Fresh off the official groundbreaking for the new Revere High School at Wonderland, the city council got a progress report on the nearly $500 million project at Monday night’s meeting.
“Tonight, I wanted to give you a brief look back on a few milestones the project has hit in the last month or two and then a similar month or two look ahead,” said Brian Dakin of LeftField, the owner’s project manager for the new high school. “In the last few months, we finished the 60 percent construction documents phase. We’ve subsequently submitted that to the MSBA (the Massachusetts School Building Authority, which is slated to reimburse more than $230 million of the cost of the project).”
The most important takeaway from that milestone is that the construction cost estimates for the project are coming in under budget, Dakin said.
“As you know, we have Consigli on as the construction manager, we always do peer estimates, two estimates in parallel,” said Dakin. “Ultimately, the Consigli cost estimate was $8.6 million under the prior budget and the peer estimate was $10.9 million under for construction costs. It’s a very good sign, but again, those are just estimates.”
As the project moves forward into bidding in the next several months, Dakin said there will be a clearer picture on if those estimates will hold.
“We have also launched a number of peer reviews of the design, peer reviews for structural, fire code, building code, those are items that we have launched after speaking with the fire department, (and) the building commissioner,” said Dakin. “With the structural peer review, it is required by Mass General Law, so the 60 percent construction document sets are being reviewed by about four different entities. They have comments back to us and we will debate the merits of their comments, incorporate them into the future 90 percent construction drawings and ultimately the final drawings that will get bid.”
In terms of site work, the first phase of demolition on the site should be completed in the next several weeks.
“We should be done cleaning up the abandoned utilities and old foundations of the former Wonderland dog track,” Dakin said. “We have hit no underground surprises in terms of soil contamination or potential change order events for the project.”
Looking ahead to the next two to four weeks, Dakin said he anticipates the project completing the state MEPA (Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act) process, bringing the environmental permitting for the rest of the project to completion.
“The only early scope we are bidding, when I say early scope, it is scope we are bidding off the pre-final construction documents … we bid site work, concrete, (and) steel early,” said Dakin. “Those are out in the street; we do not have bid results, we will have bid results in the next two to three weeks.”
That early scope bidding accounts for about one-third of the total construction cost of the project, Dakin said.
“That will at least give us really good resolution and real dollars about where we are financially,” said Dakin. “The other thing I will say about the bidding process is that we don’t have numbers yet, but there has been really high interest; there is a ton of interest out there for this.”
The 90 percent construction drawings will be released in September and then there will be another round of two estimates on anything that is not bid on those drawings, Dakin said.
“We’ll release the final construction document package by the end of the year and bid the rest of the project other than those early items,” he said.
Actual site work on the project should get underway in September or October with the foundations being poured through the winter, and then moving onto steel and elevated concrete decks in the late winter and early spring of next year.
“By spring and next summer, if there’s a construction trade out there, they will be on that site,” said Dakin. “We should have the building closed in and onto mechanical systems and interiors fall into next winter, and then really work out the interior of the building in 2027 and be ready to move in in 2028. We still are holding schedule, we are holding budget, we are showing that we are somewhere in the realm of estimated $10 million under the budget and we hope to improve that by the bidding process, and we are about to complete most of permitting.”
Councillor-at-Large Michelle Kelley said that she would like to see additional contingencies for savings in the project in addition to the project coming in under budget.
“The $10 million that we are saving, the $10 million that was requested, it’s a great start,” said Kelley. “But on a $500 million budget, it doesn’t really seem like something that’s meaty enough to dent the budget. I don’t know if we can have more talks about exactly what amenities are included … I just think that these are things we need to be involved in as a city council and as elected officials.”
Dakin said it would make sense to bring another update to the council in October when about a third of the project has been bid out.
“We can show you real bid results for that, we will have that whole (value engineering) list updated and we can potentially go through it in a manner that is a little more not full of acronyms and abbreviations and building jargon, and we should really be through the permitting process and launching construction,” Dakin said. “I think an update two months from now would be appropriate and I think maybe two months after that should put us a lot closer to bidding the rest of the building. That’s really the big item at this point of where these bids come in.
“It might make the job difficult if they come in high to really hit the $10 million reduced budget,” he continued. “It might make it instantly easy and we might be able to exceed it.”
