As the Taylor Independent School District readies for Phase 1 of the $82.5 bond construction, officials are tweaking project timelines to keep the budget on track.
“We received the guaranteed maximum price for Drymalla (Construction) for Phase 1 construction … which is approximately $2.3 million, so that leaves us with an overage of approximately $160,000 or 7 percent,” said the bond’s project manager Aaron Mullins at the Feb. 20 meeting of the Board of Trustees. “But right now, I wouldn’t say there is a large concern.”
Mullins said the plan is to slightly reshuffle the timeline of Phase 1 of the Bond, which was budgeted for $2.17 million and planned to be completed this summer, and will include safety and security upgrades at Pasemann Elementary School and Main Street Intermediate School, a new playground at MSI, as well as cosmetic updates for TH Johnson Elementary School, Pasemann and MSI.
To save about $100,000, the district is slightly delaying plans to install secure fencing and entrances for Taylor High School as a part of Phase 1, and instead including them as part of Phase 2, which is a larger $38.5 million construction project starting in the fall to build a new Career and Technical Education Center, and to complete renovations and other upgrades to the high school campus and MSI.
“The work at Taylor High School that was discussed earlier was removed from Phase 1, and that was really due to cost savings,” Mullins said. “It had such a small scope of work, it was only about $250,000 worth of work and the rest was supervision, so it was just very inefficient to that work this summer, and it has an approximate savings of about $96,000 dollars by just waiting until we are at Taylor High to do that small portion of the work.”
Mullins said a reason for the overages for the initial phase of construction had to do in part with changing the design for MSI’s playground.
“MSI has an overage of about $271,000, and a lot of that was due to the playground area being expanded and needing additional work,” Mullins said. “In the original bond, it was swapping out playground equipment to match Pasemann, and that was about the scope of the work, but once it was reviewed and looked at, the area really needed to be expanded to be sized more like Pasemann.”
In addition, Mullins said the team is having to work with Oncor Electric Delivery to relocate electrical service, which is currently running across the playground and must be moved before work can begin.
After the meeting, Superintendent Devin Padavil said officials are looking closely at all these costs and working hard to make sure the bond-money is spent efficiently.
“What we are trying to do is reduce costs to stay within budget, and just like anything, everything in the market that involves supplies and construction is just more expensive,” Padavil said. “So we are doing everything we can to make sure we deliver on what the community wanted, and we stay within budget and make an effort to try and save the taxpayers money on this bond.”
