The uncompleted — unstarted — solar roofs caved in on the School Board last night.
With the chastened Board having just absorbed a rare drubbing from two score of teed-off community members for allegedly not disclosing details of four expensive capital projects, the keen Wit of the Board, Steve Gourley, sprang into action. He surveyed the overflowing Council Chambers in search of a villain.
Surrounded by suspects and promptly absolving his colleagues on the dais, he determined somebody in the audience must be at fault.
After more than two decades of exposure to hometown and statewide politics, the wily detective didn’t take long to make a rhetorical arrest.
In the first of a succinct series of vinegar-dipped salvos that will serve as his retirement farewell to the School Board in the autumn of his life, Mr. Gourley concluded that “the press” was to blame for failing to disclose pertinent portions of the four projects that still were baffling Board members themselves last evening.
Here Is the Cost. There It Goes.
As of the lunch hour today, the four projects are estimated to cost roundly $16 million. The District has $12 million in the bank, with the balance — tentatively — scheduled to arrive in the form of matching state funds
A year ago, the Board set off celebrations across the community when it announced intentions to launch four major face-changers across the School District:
• Huge renovations to the Athletic Fields.
• Upgraded elevators at the Middle School and Culver City High School.
• Numerous but undefined renovations at the venerable Robert Frost Auditorium.
• Solar paneling for the high school, Middle School and Farragut School.
Vexed residents and Board members never did agree on which direction the capital projects are going.
“You are moving too fast and we know too little and costs are much too high, and rising,” numerous speakers complained.
From the dais, Board member Karlo Silbiger said residents themselves were traveling the wrong way.
“This is the most backward project I have seen since I have been on the Board (the last two years),” he said. Costs and incompletely identified changes aside, “the biggest problem of all is that we have made almost no progress in the past year. Why are there timelines for two of the projects but not the others?”
A barrage of salty-tipped arrows such as this inquiry was aimed at Ali Delawalla, Asst. Supt. of Business Services, who may be the most congenial employee in the District and surely is one of the best-liked. His reliable, low-key presentations at every meeting seldom stir the wind. Last night, though, he and the Board were forced to play defense.
Facing accusations that the athletic field costs inexplicably had ballooned when the community was looking the other way, Mr. Delawalla softly, firmly replied he had identified last night’s $8.5 million figure back in January.
Specificity Is Missing
When questioned about specific renovations and costs at the Frost, he said he and others still were trying to figure them out.
According to School District sources, here is why last night’s meeting, billed as an update on the capital projects, turned gnarly at times:
Due to the absence of a precise game-plan — which was unavoidable — in at least three of the four instances (excepting the elevators, where the upgrades are mandated), the ballyhooed master plan began slipping into an amorphous, inevitable bog as costs expanded and design intentions appeared to grow muddier. No one in particular seems to blame for two main reasons:
• Building costs at all times are liquid, and
• Environment-related upgrades and costs, by their nature, are abstractions, indecipherably ambiguous from day to day.
Couple those factors with strong but not always welcome, and far from expert, counseling from idealistic environmentalists, and you will end up with what emerged last night:
Community members and elected offices engaging in a bottomless taffy pull over complex political, physical and fiscal cross-currents that residents demand be explained simply and immediately, and the Board saying, roughly, we have.
Three of four Request for Proposal documents misfired. One explanation was too many hands involved and a surplus of amateurs.
The year-old Environmental Sustainability Committee, chaired by Todd Johnson, gave updates on how the whole District, children and adults, can go green daily, and on a coordinated recycling program to replace the current “haphazard” one.
But what made the appearance of the half-dozen committee members memorable was the repeated complaint that the rest of the District was not capitalizing on their expertise by consulting them often enough. Others asserted they were meddling too much.
In summary, here is how a District employee described the four capital projects:
“It is only sort of accurate to say the whole project totals $16 million and we have $12 million of it here. The District was told by Mr. Delawalla that he thinks we can do the athletic fields for $8.5 million. But only half is ours. The other half would come from the state.
“Two million dollars was earmarked for Robert Frost. That will not solve all of the problems there. It may cover big issues, air conditioning, heating, new stage, new sound, new screen. They just won’t be state-of-the-art. In this case, we need ‘good enough,’ not ‘best in the world.’
“About $1 million has been put away for the elevators, although they will cost less.
“That puts us at $7 million of District money. Potentially, $2.5 million was earmarked for solar.
“The School Board did not vote to spend $8.5 million on athletics, but that is what the Board has agreed to spend. An RFP is not available on that yet, so it is not clear what it will cost. An RFP is not out yet on the Robert Frost because the Board doesn’t know exactly what it wants to do. Putting an RFP out now makes no sense.
“Let’s call the whole project a work-in-progress,” she said.
