The Haines Borough last week put on hold replacement of the Mosquito Lake School heating system to hear concerns from school board members who question the project’s pricetag and design and say they were left out of decision-making.
The school board on Monday will revisit the issue at its regular meeting starting 7 p.m. in the school open area.
On July 27, the borough assembly accepted a low bid of $201,550 from Dawson Construction and voted to go ahead with the project, including installation of two oil-fired boilers, recirculating pumps and digital controls.
The borough has received $180,491 in state money for the work, but 35 percent of total project costs are to be borne by the school district.
school board members – who’ve previously raised questions about project costs – want the last word. They say the price is too high for the 6,880-square-foot structure and that they were left out of the loop during the project’s bid process. The system also supplies heat to a detached, 2,000-square-foot maintenance building.
The dispute is a tiff between the borough, which funds the school, owns school buildings and pays for major school improvements, and the district, which operates and maintains buildings.
“We haven’t seen what went out to bid or what was bid, or any portion of the bid,” said school board chair Carol Kelly. “The school district has to pay 35 percent of the cost, and it hasn’t had a part in the process yet. The board has been left out of the loop.”
Board member Sarah Swinton said she didn’t understand why the borough was insisting on a two-boiler system. “It makes no sense to throw away money if we don’t need to. If we can get it cheaper, that’s where we need to go… I don’t see why we can’t use two Toyos (stoves).”
“If the borough wants to pay for all of it, and not have us pay 35 percent, they can go for it,” Swinton said.
The argument for Toyos also was made by assemblyman Norm Smith at the July 27 meeting. Smith and Scott Rossman voted against accepting the $201,550 bid, and assemblyman Jerry Lapp also was critical of it, although he voted in favor. The go-ahead vote was 4-2.
Borough facilities chief Brad Maynard, who has shepherded the project, said the Toyo argument has appeal on the surface, but there’s more involved.
A boiler provides the building’s hot water and also can accommodate even distribution of heat through about a half-dozen rooms in the school, including rest rooms, he said. Toyo-type stoves use more expensive fuel which provides fewer thermal units per gallon, he said.
Eliminating one boiler would save about $40,000, but it would reduce efficiency and eliminate a back-up boiler that would guarantee continuous service, he said. Two smaller boilers also burn less fuel than a larger, single unit, he said.
Board members this week questioned how the fuel savings from two boilers would compare to the extra $40,000 cost of the second boiler.
Maynard said the bid for the job included alternatives, including installation of new coil piping and the electronic control system that automatically turns down the heat after school and on weekends.
Maynard said he’s already eliminated the new piping, bringing the cost down to $185,000, but the electronic controls would more than pay for themselves. He said he didn’t solicit bids for a single-boiler system because the borough didn’t have a design for such a system.
Without an engineer’s design, competing bids on a single-boiler system would likely be so disparate as to be useless, he said.
Maynard said the original specifications of the project were “to replace all the piping and controls, to build another 35-year heating system instead of having a 35-year-old system with two boilers tacked on to it.”
Maynard said the cost of the project wasn’t out of the norm, noting that the State of Alaska – for grant funding purposes – developed its own estimate for the job and came up with $280,000.
Assemblyman Lapp said he agreed with the decision to stop the project for further discussion. “It just needs to be discussed and explained to everyone, how it got to this point. People feel it wasn’t explained well enough or they weren’t in the process.”
Lapp said he wouldn’t have voted to accept the $201,000 bid for the work if the Haines Borough – instead of the school district — had to pay the project’s 35 percent share.
Superintendent Michael Byer said district funds were to be used because the district initially led efforts on the project. The school has $119,000 set aside for the work in its facilities and equipment fund.
The district typically uses the fund to buy things like furniture and maintenance equipment, Byer said. The line between “routine” maintenance funded by the district and “major maintenance” paid by borough isn’t a clear one, he said. “We’ve talked in our joint meetings about making that distinction.”
Borough manager Mark Earnest told the assembly Tuesday he made an oversight by not taking the project bids back to the school board for review.
Dawson has ordered equipment to do the work but school board members this week said the project may not be done until next year. School maintenance staff have indicated the aging boiler would last another school year, they said.
The project has been in planning for three years.