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A shower or two possible this evening with partly cloudy skies overnight. Low near 60F. Winds NW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

A shower or two possible this evening with partly cloudy skies overnight. Low near 60F. Winds NW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 30%.

Excavators, bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment sat idle Tuesday afternoon on the site of the new Vermillion Elementary School located west of the Vermillion Middle School, which can be seen in the background of this photo.

Excavators, bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment sat idle Tuesday afternoon on the site of the new Vermillion Elementary School located west of the Vermillion Middle School, which can be seen in the background of this photo.

Mitch Osowski, a facilities solutions group project manager and Steve Thiele, vice president, both of Hausmann Construction and Sean Ervin of TSP gave Vermillion School Board members an update on the progress of the new elementary school project at the board’s meeting Monday night.

“We’ve partnered with TSP and Hausmann Construction over the past nine months or so to really create not only a plan for our school district in terms of moving into a new building,” Superintendent Damon Alvey said, “but also establishing some guaranteed maximum pricing and helping us make some decision along the way to get us to that point.

He added that it was hoped that later during the night, the school board would approve an agreement for moving forward with a maximum guaranteed price for the building project.

“We’ll still have some flexibility in that if more dollars were to come available to us in some form or if the pricing for future bids come in really, really healthy, then we’ve got some opportunities to still do some things with the project along the way,” he said.

It was a process that required school board members to review several pages of multi-colored value engineering listings of 40 different components that have been considered for the new school.

Nearly all of the items in the list reflect components that have been changed from the original plan or that have been eliminated, all in an attempt to keep the costs of the new building under control.

The bottom line of the data states that there is currently a savings of nearly $1.85 million in the cost detail list of items that have already been bid out. The list touches on a wide range of items, from changing metal studs in restrooms, to insulating exhaust duct work.

Some items, with cost reductions totaling $82,000, fall in an “either/or” category in the bid engineering list, while $1.22 million of cost savings are in a “yes” listing, meaning they have been bid out.

The board and construction managers data indicate no bids have been received yet among a category of items that total $258,000 in cost savings. Some items have fallen into a “maybe” category when it comes to seeking bids in the data presented Monday. That listing represents a trimming of $45,700 in the project’s cost.

Documents presented by Hausmann Construction Monday state that the contract sum is “guaranteed by the construction manager not to exceed $33,547,174, subject to additions and deductions by change order as provided in the contract documents. The contract sum assumes the value engineering items noted above will be incorporated into the construction documents.”

“Five or six months ago, you all approved a contract with us that basically didn’t have time or costs associated with it,” Thiele said. “It was basically just a zero dollar contract that had terms and conditions in place.”

Documents presented to the board Monday were an amendment to that contract, he said, that assigns both the costs and time to the contract.

“The substantial completion date (of the new school) that we’re agreeing to is for June 21, 2024,” Thiele said. “That would be a substantially complete building that would be complete to the point that you could occupy it and use it for your intended use.”

“Typically, we’re not going to finish 120,000 square feet all at one time, so as we get areas completed, we’ll let you get in there, but this is the ultimate completion date for the entire thing,” he said.

In October 2021, Vermillion School District voters agreed at the ballot box that it is time to construct a new elementary school to replace the district’s two aging buildings for grade school students.

A 60% margin was needed for a successful bond election and 74.79% of voters on Oct. 5, 2021 agreed with the Vermillion School Board that it is time to issue $26 million in general obligation bonds to finance the construction of a new school building.

The new school will be built on property owned by the Vermillion School District directly west of Vermillion Middle School. The two buildings will be connected.

The school district has also issued Capital Outlay certificates and will dip into its Capital Outlay reserves to provide additional funds to cover higher-than-expected costs of the new building.

The bonds will be paid over time by property taxpayers in the Vermillion School District. Alvey noted during a school board meeting earlier this year that the funds provided by Capital Outlay certificates and Capital Outlay reserves will not have an effect on local property taxes.

“The key thing is that neither of those options that the board has exercised has an impact on taxpayer contributions at all,” he said. “Those are things that the district takes on in debt and added reserves that we’ll be able to move forward to make sure that we don’t have to make any hard cuts … with this project.”

Jolley and Austin elementary schools, both constructed in the mid-1950s, are not keeping pace with modern education trends, the board determined, and an investment of at least $6 million to $8 million would be needed now to give each building an estimated 10 more years of life.

In the months since the bond issue was approved, the school administrators and members of the Vermillion School Board have worked with TSP, an architectural firm from Sioux Falls that has worked on the design of the new building and Hausmann Construction of Norfolk, Nebraska, the project’s building manager.

The design of the school has been a work in progress for the past several months as the costs of building materials has steadily risen. Early in the process, architects had drawn up designs for a facility totaling approximately 138,000 square feet. Currently, plans call for constructing a school with an approximate area of 114,000 square feet.

Also approved Monday night by the board were clarifications to the GMP (Good Manufacturing Process) agreement it has with Hausmann Construction.

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