By Adam Swift
The city should soon begin seeing reimbursements coming into its coffers from the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) for the new high school project at Wonderland.
Brian Dakin, the owner’s project manager for the city from LeftField, provided an update on the $493 million high school project at last week’s meeting of the high school building committee.
The MSBA awarded the city of Revere a grant of $233,889,807 for this project.
At the meeting, Dakin also noted that major environmental permitting for the new school has been completed, and that the schedule is holding to open the school for the 2028-29 school year.
“Generally speaking permitting wise, we are done with the conservation commission and we are done with MEPA (the state environmental protection agency),” said Dakin. “To be specific, we have gotten the FEIR (environmental impact report) from MEPA. That concludes the MEPA process fully.”
The Revere Conservation Commission has issued its order of conditions for the project and it will be registered with the state registry of deeds, Dakin said.
“We are using that order of conditions to help bring a lot of this site work award stuff to completion,” said Dakin. “The good news is that we are, at this point, generally out of the ConCom and MEPA business, we are proceeding with working toward final building permits, which we will do in a phased manner. One of our last ongoing permitting tasks is related to a Chapter 91 waterways license that we have noted before and will not inhibit our proceeding into phase 2 construction.”
The 60 percent construction documents for the new high school were submitted to the MSBA last month and they reviewed the documents and issued standard comments, Dakin said.
“The completion of MEPA also allowed the city to sign the project funding agreement, which they issued well over a year ago and was the basis for our financial presentation to this committee, the school committee, and the city council,” said Dakin. “However, that agreement could not be executed until we were done with MEPA.”
With the document signed, Dakin said the city can start inputting for the reimbursement for the work done over the past year and will get money flowing into the city.
“They will open up their financial system, called ProPay, and LeftField will work with them and (city CFO) Rich Viscay’s folks to make sure all the invoices we’ve processed for the last year plus get reviewed and reimbursed,” said Dakin. “After that point, we will be on a regular monthly cycle with MSBA where this committee approves invoices, they get paid, LeftField submits them to MSBA, MSBA processes them, reviews them, and issues reimbursements on a monthly basis.”
As for bidding, Dakin said out of the initial award of five trades that were being bid, the bidding process for concrete and steel has been completed, and the contract for demolition was awarded several months ago.
“We’re at an aggregate of about $7.8 million under the budget,” said Dakin. “We are still in the process of wrapping up bidding for underground waterproofing, elevators, and site work; site work being the big one.”
Dakin said some of those major components for bidding could be wrapped up this week with a special building committee meeting to award more contracts.
“I do think, as a warning, it is good that we are $7.8 million under,” said Dakin. “We don’t have numbers, but we anticipate the site work is probably not going to be under budget.”
There have been a series of meetings to iron out the bidding process in the past several weeks.
“This bidding, we are going to track it as an aggregate,” said Dakin. “We’ll be issuing a 90 percent construction document package at the end of this month that will get estimated, and we will review with the committee where we are with those first five trades, how over, how under. If needed, we will run a value management, value engineering process next month if we have to correct for the budget.”
The total cost of the project was initially tapped at about $493 million, but the Revere High School Building Committee agreed to trim $10 million from that amount.
