For the second time in a row, bids received for the expansion of the town’s middle school/high school complex came in too high and the Secaucus Board of Education voted to reject them at their Oct. 30 meeting.
After having rejected bids received in September, school officials received bids again on Oct. 16. After reviewing them, officials determined that they again had come in too high.
“The bids came in over what we budgeted for the project,” said Board Member Anthony Rinaldi.
This means that school officials will sit down with the architect to begin developing a checklist of items that will be presented to contractors in order to negotiate a more acceptable price. Under state law, the school board has to seek bids twice, after which they can negotiate the best offer.
“The area of biggest concern is the general contracting section,” Rinaldi said, noting that the bids are divided into five areas of expertise: mechanical, plumbing, steel work, electrical and general contracting.
Rinaldi said a menu of items will be developed and items will be taken out of the project in order to bring the cost into line with the amounts the board agreed to pay for the project.
Voters approved the $14 million expansion in September 2002 to cover a range of repairs and changes to the schools including the conversion of former workshop spaces into classrooms, and other educational-based projects. This also included the construction of a 1,000-seat auditorium. The project also set aside $400,000 to upgrade kitchen equipment from electric to gas and allocated more than $1 million to reconfigure rooms on the second level of the high school for science labs.
The project also includes constructing classrooms for music and other outside work.
The auditorium is perhaps the biggest change in the whole expansion project, since it requires new construction in an area currently occupied by a parking lot traffic circle.
Rinaldi said the next round of negotiations with the six companies that gave bids would take a few weeks.
“Within four weeks, we should be able to come back with a recommendation,” Rinaldi said.
One of our streams is missing?
One possible obstacle to the project may be the location of a stream that the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission claims school officials filled in without authorization when the high school was constructed in the mid-1970s.
School officials are seeking information about the issue, although former Councilman Robert Campanella – who sat on the Board of Education during the construction phase of the high school – recalled the stream being filled in.
“We thought we were doing everything proper,” he said during a telephone interview last week.
Board member Tom Troyer said the matter is being investigated by the board attorney to determine what was done. Troyer said he felt that the approvals for the project went back to 1973. If the matter is not resolved, this could hold up work on the proposed auditorium, and possibly also hinder possible construction of a future recreation center for the site.