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SAN BENITO — After a four-month shutdown, San Benito school district officials are jump-starting construction on a $40 million bond-funded project as a contractor works to repair supports under two buildings.
About four months ago, the district’s administration, under the past school board, halted San Benito’s biggest construction project aimed at building its first performing arts theater and aquatics center after Mike Alex, the architect serving as the project’s manager, questioned whether some supports, or geopiers, were not aligned with the foundations’ targets.
The shutdown has led the overall project to fall about seven months behind schedule, officials said.
Based on new survey findings, a consulting engineer found the district’s administration baselessly ordered construction halted while requesting a construction team determine whether two buildings’ supports were flawed, school board President Orlando Lopez said after a July 28 teleconference with parties involved in the project.
“It’s extremely unfortunate this shutdown occurred,” he said in an interview. “The project should have never been stopped. There was misinformation that was presented to us and the community as to the degree of these buildings and construction. I want the community to rest assured that this board is doing everything we can to get this project up and going (despite) the minor setbacks we’ve had.”
District won’t incur repair costs
The district won’t be paying for repairs, Lopez said.
“There’s going to be no additional cost to the district,” he said. “This remediation will fall on the contractor. The contracts protect the school district.”
In 2019, Lopez was part of a previous administration which entered into the construction contract, locking in prices before the coronavirus pandemic’s materials cost escalations began impacting projects, he said.
“With these price escalations, the buildings we’re getting right now have almost doubled in cost, but because we got the (contract) a long time ago, we’re not going to incur additional costs,” he said.
Installing additional supports
After the teleconference, Balthazar Salazar, a Houston-based attorney overseeing the construction project, said Davila Construction, the San Antonio-based contractor, will resume work July 31.
“The sky is not falling,” he said in an interview. “This is not as the district said. This project did not have to stop. This is real information — not misinformation. Eighty percent of concrete hasn’t been poured.”
Now, the construction team is planning to install additional geopiers, or deeply-anchored 2-foot-wide rock columns, in areas in which piers were found misaligned with the buildings’ foundations, Salazar said.
“Primarily, they’re going to add geopiers to strengthen those misaligned,” he said. “This project could have continued while you (install) geopiers.”
Repair plan
Beneath the building to serve as the district’s first performing arts center, the construction team found some misaligned geopiers, Salazar said.
“There are a few where they have to add a couple of piers,” he said. “The tolerance is six inches — they’re off by about nine inches. We want to make it as perfect as possible.”
Meanwhile, the construction team is planning to remove some misaligned geopiers while installing new piers under the building to serve as the district’s first aquatics center, Salazar said.
“They’re going to start tearing down old geopiers and re-do them,” he said.
During construction, crews installed geopiers about 15 feet into the ground to “stabilize” the area’s sandy soil, Salazar said.
“Geopiers stabilize the soil,” he said. “They are not tied to the foundation. If you have soft, sandy agricultural soil, that’s where you put geopiers.”
About 1,700 geopiers have been installed beneath each building’s foundation, Tony Vargas, Davila Construction’s senior project manager, said in an earlier interview.
Background
In 2018, Lopez helped a previous administration push for a $40 million bond issue to fund construction of the $21.3 million performing arts theater, the $8.8 million aquatics center and a $5.7 million indoor practice field, which has been completed.
In a heated election, 54 percent of voters passed the bond issue.
In October 2021, Davila Construction launched the project to build the performing arts theater and aquatics center.
In February, before officials shut down the construction project, a district report showed Davila Construction was requesting the performing arts theater’s completion date be pushed from July 21 to Dec. 28 while the aquatics center’s completion date be changed from April 14 to Sept. 19.
Officials haven’t announced changes to the project’s timetable.
