City Close to Picking a New High School Project Manager

At last week’s Revere School Committee meeting, Revere Public School Superintendent Dr. Dianne Kelly reported that the City of Revere has narrowed down the list of prospective Owner’s Project Manager (OPM) that will oversee the design and construction of a new Revere High School to nine firms, and has tentatively picked one of those companies. 

In July Revere’s Purchasing Agent Michael Piccardi published a Request For Submissions (RFS) to begin searching for a “responsive and responsible” firm to act as a OPM in the event the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) gives the city the green light to build a new high school. 

Kelly said that the Revere OPM Selection Committee conducted ‘boat loads’ of work researching the firms, digesting their bid proposals that ranged between 50 and 100 pages and ranking each proposal from best to worst. 

“All members of the OPM Selection Committee independently ranked all the companies and sent our ratings to Michael Piccardi,” Kelly told the School Committee. 

Piccardi said each member of the OPM Selection Committee all coincidently picked the same firm. 

“(Michael) Piccardi went through all our results and told us who the highest ranking firm was,” said Kelly. “It was very unanimous.”

Now Revere will get the MSBA to enter into contract negotiations with the firm in the next week or so. 

If everything goes according to plan, the firm will be announced officially at the Sept. 14 MSBA OPM approval meeting. 

“From there we will move into design team selection as well as looking at different parcels of land (for the new high school),” said Kelly. 

An OPM provides independent advice on project scope, design, value engineering, scheduling, contractual matters, and more. With allegiance to neither the designer nor the contractor, the OPM will act in the city and MSBA’s best interest to manage projects from beginning to end. According to industry insiders a good OPM can save a lot of time and money, especially on a project as large as building a new high school. 

The selection of an OPM  is the next step in the process as Revere officials move into the Feasibility Study phase of the high school project,

In April, the MSBA voted to authorize inviting the City of Revere to collaborate with the MSBA in conducting a Feasibility Study to build a new high school in the city. 

Revere was one of five school districts chosen by the MSBA on April 15 with the others being the Town of Brookline, the City of Haverhill, the Spencer-East Brookfield Regional School District, and the Town of Webster. 

The vote by the MSBA came on the heels of a vote by the Revere City Council to approve a $2 million appropriation to begin the Feasibility Study to build a new high school in the city back in February. 

Kelly said once the OPM is chosen she expects the Feasibility Study to take about two years.

In 2018 Revere Public Schools cleared a major hurdle during a MSBA board meeting. At that meeting, the MSBA board voted to invite Revere and ten other school districts that filed Statements of Interest (SOI) this year to take part in the eligibility process that could ultimately lead to grant money to build a new high school.