New Haven Independent

Located in its own 3,000 square foot building near the central kitchen close to the Ross/Woodward School, the freezer had flaws from the beginning when it was completed in 2003, according to the Board of Ed’s Tom Smith reported at a Finance and Administration Committee meeting Monday night. These flaws included faulty doors and other ways for condensation to enter the building and then freeze up, occasionally forming icicles in the light fixtures and occasionally making the floor slick as an ice rink.

According to Will Clark, the BOE’s chief operating officer, there’s only been one ice-related accident. But the sub-zero freezer has been in need of dehumidifier controls, faster closing doors, and other modifications. It receives, on large dollies, cooked in the nearby central kitchen and delivered by the truckload, some 20,000 meals a day during the school year (and 6,000 during the summer). The meals are frozen immediately after cooking, for delivery to the schools a day or two later. Since the creation of the central kitchen, cafeterias at the local schools generally just heat up the meals prepared (and frozen) at the central kitchen.

The Administration and Finance Committee approved a contract in the amount of $28,000 to provide design and engineering corrections for these problems. Smith said that the total re-design cost will amount to $50,000.

However, he had the prescience not to pay the original designer full fees and instead withheld about $60,000, as freezer problems emerged. Those withheld fees will cover the new costs of design. The actual work — new doors, humidifier controls, as well as training of staff in managing the automation — will amount to approximately $200,000 in new dollars that the BOE will have to come up with.

Roofs

Be grateful you don’t live in a school-sized building when your roof starts leaking. Three major roof replacement projects for the BOE — at the Cross CT Scholars Building, at the Helene Grant School, and at the Micro Society Magnet School — were all put on hold. All the paperwork has been completed and the funding approved up and down the line. Two of these roofs come in at $1 million, and one at $500,000.

Why the delay? The reason is complicated, according to school rebuilding chief Sue Weisselberg, but has to do with an 11th hour piece of legislation in Hartford passed in July mandating that all projects go to the “lowest responsible bidder.” The bill, said Weisselberg, didn’t receive much of a public hearing. Many school districts across the state, including New Haven’s, already had projects under way where the lowest bidder might not have been the most qualified, experienced, or trusted.

“We like to mix and match the architects and construction managers we use for our projects,” said Weisselberg, “taking into consideration if they’ve done similar buildings in the past, how close, for example, they might live to a site, or how comfortable they are in interacting with the community. Appearance at community meetings for input, for example, is something that doesn’t always come with the very lowest bidder. And we expect that and a lot more of the architects and designers we use in New Haven.”

She said she understands that the intent of this legislation is to save taxpayers money. But if the job is done by the lowest bidder who turns out not to know his two-penny nails from rivets, or doesn’t have proper financing and has to walk from a job, or knows residential roofs but has never worked on a school roof, litigation can ensue. The lowest bidder suddenly becomes extremely expensive.

So the three New Haven roof projects now must go out for re-bidding. Meanwhile the New Haven BOE — and construction entities throughout the state — will try to figure out how best to continue what they believe are best practices in hiring architects and construction managers, to be on the right side of the law.

“We’re quite concerned that the new legislation will take away from us the discretion we’ve had to get the right people for each job,” Weisselberg said, “but until we resolve that, we’ve been advised by corporation counsel to rebid.”