SAN BENITO — For months, the school board’s new majority has questioned delays in the $40 million bond-funded project aimed at building the district’s first performing arts theater, aquatics center and in-door practice field.
Questions have led board President Ramiro Moreno to propose the district’s pending forensic audit review the project under the management of the Brighton Group and President Joseph Palacios, whose contract with the district paid his Edinburg-based firm $1.25 million to oversee the project launched in 2019.
While Palacios completed construction of the $5.6 million, 60,000-square-foot in-door practice field in April, crews continue to work on the foundation of the $22 million, 68,747 square-foot performing arts theater and the $8.5 million, 22,000-square-foot aquatics center featuring a competition pool and “warm-up” pool.
However, school attorney Steven Weller’s review of the project supports Palacios, who argues the coronavirus pandemic led to materials’ shortages and soaring price hikes that led to delays as he worked to find “alternative” materials to help cut costs.
Weller report supports Palacios
During a meeting, Weller gave board members his report after Palacios presented them with an update on the project.
Weller, whose legal experience includes construction work, said some decisions were made regarding the buildings’ square footage.
“What I observed when I looked at those reductions was that there were natural reactions in terms of those decisions that were the result largely of COVID — material price increases that happened as a result of COVID,” he told board members during the Dec. 7 meeting. “So, if certain things get more expensive, then you have to make adjustments to keep the projects in budget and it’s that simple. It’s an ongoing process to try to keep the project in budget.”
During his 10-minute report, Weller noted board members approved the project’s changes.
“You heard comments from your project architect that talked about the importance of certain features to make a facility that was going to be different and make the district a leader in the region for having a facility like that, and I think that you kept that and that was a lot of hard work trying to figure out how to economize and value-engineer the project to try to keep it within certain numbers without sacrificing the things that you felt were most important and that you wanted to offer to your students and your community,” he said.
“A lot of these things were outside of the control of the design folks. In terms of the budgetary items, it’s an ongoing process to try to make sure that you stay within budget.”
Board members question delays, project quality
During Palacios’ 30-minute presentation, board members questioned the project.
“You have to understand us from our perspective because we go out in the public and I always get, ‘What’s going on in the construction site?’ — and I don’t know what to tell them,” board member Oscar Medrano told Palacios.
Meanwhile, Moreno and board member Janie Lopez said they wanted to make sure cost-cutting steps didn’t compromise the buildings’ quality and functionality.
“We get a lot of questions because the community’s curious,” Lopez told Palacios. “They want to see the buildings already. Another question we always get — ‘Are we getting what was promised in the beginning and are we on budget?’ What about the quality? Did that reduce the quality when you all had to reduce the price?”
Value engineering
During his presentation, Palacios said discussions with the board led him to “value-engineer,” replacing steel piers with Geopiers, stiff rock columns drilled deeply into the buildings’ foundation, to save $2.9 million.
The cost-cutting steps also led him to trim the size of the performing arts theater’s aluminum canopy.
Meanwhile, he said board discussions led him to extend the length of the indoor practice field from 60 to 90 feet while selecting top-of-the-line steel-shelled Myrtha Pools instead of plaster-based pools for the aquatics center.
However, the board’s request for the smaller “warm-up” pool tacked about $1.8 million to the project’s total cost, he said.
Palacios blames delays on pandemic supply shortages, price hikes
In October, San Antonio-based contractor Davila Construction broke ground on the performing arts theater off Interstate 69, Palacios said.
“COVID put a huge, huge impact on this,” he told board members.
“We were as creative as we could be to still deliver,” he said. “There are significant savings and there are some impacts to costs due to materials. To some degree there were some changes but nothing (was) compromised. We didn’t cut anything in aesthetics or programming or anything in any of the buildings. Some little tweaks … still preserve the integrity of the building, the aesthesis of the building as well as the functionality of the building.”
Palacios said he’s keeping costs within his budget.
“The direction we have always been given is, ‘$40 million is all we have,’ and that was in 2018 when you sold it to the general public,” he said. “In 2019, you went to the bond market — cost escalation in construction is 3-to 5-percent just annually. But then you put COVID into it when it hit us in 2019, it even skyrocketed even further.”
Negotiating cost savings
Palacios told board members cost savings aren’t compromising the buildings’ quality and functionality.
“I want to rest assure the general public that if we looked at cost savings, if wasn’t to make less of a building or less of facility that’s going to not really grasp what you were looking for. We preserved all those elements,” he said.
Palacios said he, Davila Construction and ROFA Architects are working to bring down costs.
“It has required each one of these professional firms to go through this process as if we’re going through three different sets of projects because of cost overruns or materials and the challenges of supply,” he said.
“We are seeing it and we are concerned about some items — steel and we’re trying to work through it,” he said. “I’ll give you an example — steel just went up almost a million dollars. With the negotiations, we’re seeing $200,000 down. They’re doing whatever they can do to just get them down to where it’s manageable, all within the program, but it’s been some work. It’s been an every-day deal.”
Palacios said the project’s value engineering led to delays.
“It took time. For that, I apologize for the time,” he said. “But the blessing has definitely been the benefit that we preserved a state-of-the-art building with all its programming and we didn’t get impacted as bad as all the other projects that are in the millions and millions of dollars and it’s all over the Valley right now, all over the state of Texas and through the nation that are having that type of impact …. There is not a project as successful as San Benito CISD’s project’s right now. You’re getting the best bang for your buck.”
