Board balks at $7M price tag for athletic project
Editor’s Note: Due to a production error, a large portion of this story was not printed in Thursday’s edition, so we are rerunning the full story.
BOYERTOWN >> The Boyertown Area School Board stepped back Tuesday from adding an additional $350,000 to the athletic facilities project at the high school, a move that would have pushed to total cost over $7 million.
Despite the recommendation from the board’s finance and facilities committee to push the final project budget to $7,083,437, the board balked.
The balking began with school board member James Brophy who said he would vote to support the original $6,733,437 project budget, which also included a new football stadium, but not one over $7 million.
“I am against a bottomline number of $7 million. We need to stick with the original budget,” he said.
The “original budget” is itself an increase over original estimates.
Approved on June 11 by a 5-2 vote, added $1 million to the original $5.7 million approved by the board in order to ensure that the scope of work did not put the district in violation of federal Americans with Disabilities Act and Title IX regulations.
Title IX requires schools to maintain policies, practices and programs that do not discriminate against anyone based on sex and the varsity softball facility needs to be made “comparable” with the boys baseball facility to comply with Title IX.
The district sought a variance for the size of the bathrooms in the filed house and concession stand planned for the softball field. It was a variance board member Jill Dennin, who heads up the board’s finance and facilities committee, said the project architect, KCBA, had assured the board is routinely granted.
But it was not. “This is not something the board had any control over,” said Dennin.
As a result, a larger design was required and that design would add $350,000 to the cost.
But board member Ruth Dierolf was having none of it.
“When we started this we were going to build a new stadium and it was going to cost $1 million. I said we would end up spending $8 million and I was not far off,” Dierolf said. “Are we closing Pine Forge so we can have a new football stadium?”
She was referring to the Nov. 26 vote by the previous school board to close Pine Forge Elementary School.
(At the same meeting, an attempt to hold off closing the school for a year failed by a 5-4 vote.)
Ultimately, the entire board voted to stay within the $6.7 million budget, which may mean that a planned maintenance building will have to be cut or reduced in size.
Superintendent Dana Bedden told the board that the bids the board voted to advertise pull the maintenance building out as an alternative.
“Adding the bathrooms will cost more and we can discuss if we can afford to fund the maintenance building. Taking the maintenance building off the table is an option,” Bedden said.
He urged the board to take action on advertising the bids Tuesday night to avoid more price increases. “The market is not in our favor. It’s a builder’s market right now,” Bedden said.