By Adam Swift
The opening of the new Revere High School has likely been pushed back to January of 2029, rather than the initially planned beginning of the 2028-29 school year.
At last week’s Revere High School Building Committee meeting, Brian Dakin of owner’s project manager LeftField presented a “good news, bad news” update on the status of the project.
The good news, Dakin said, is that estimates continue to show the project continuing to track at between $8 million to $12 million under budget.
However, Dakin said soil issues at the former Wonderland site have pushed the projected construction schedule for the project back several months.
At last week’s meeting, the building committee approved the 90 percent construction documents that will be submitted to the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA).
The MSBA awarded the city of Revere a grant of $233,889,807 for the high school building project.
The city council approved a total $492-million budget for the project, but the council and the school building committee have stated that they are working to cut at least $10 million from that figure as the project progresses.
The original construction schedule for the four-story, 422,600-square-foot school had a projected opening date in time for the beginning of the 2028-29 school year.
“This is a good news, bad news update,” Dakin said at the beginning of last week’s high school building committee meeting. “The three main pillars in any of these MSBA submissions … are scope, cost – the budget, and the schedule.”
In the 90 percent construction documents, Dakin said there are no changes to the scope of the project.
“Everything that the design subcommittee has seen is still intact in the documents; the design is intact,” said Dakin.
On the cost side, Dakin said there were two cost estimates run, with one showing the project tracking at $8.8 million under the full approved budget, and the second showing it at $12.3 million under budget.
“Those two combined are what keep me confident that we are on the path to achieve the $10 million reduction this committee has talked about; and overall, good news,” said Dakin.
However, Dakin said the news was not as good on the schedule front.
“The real short story is that we are at 90 percent projecting that the project is not going to be able to make the August/September 2028 occupancy date,” he said. “We are going to be forecasting that the move in is going to have to happen at the holidays at the end of 2028; most likely meaning the first day of class just after the new year.”
The delay in the schedule is related to the complexity of resolving ground improvements to the soil conditions at the Wonderland site, Dakin said.
“We cleared permitting in just about the time we thought, we got the bid documents for our earth work and structure a little bit around where we thought, and started receiving a lot of questions about how the soil improvements – mostly from a structural perspective – are going to be implemented for this design that was bid,” said Dakin. “That set us into a couple months of an expanded testing program that we brought a bunch of proposals to this committee to authorize basically digging more holes, doing more sampling. The amount of time it’s taken to get resolution on that, and the amount of time that’s resulting in what I would call soil management before the contractors are just getting out there and digging and pouring foundations really wasn’t accounted for properly in the schedule that showed a summer move.”
Dakin said the project lost several months going from bidding to resolving the approach to ground improvements with the subcontractor to having a definitive schedule.
“We don’t believe at this point that that schedule is recoverable from a summer move,” said Dakin.
Mayor Patrick Keefe said the delay in the construction schedule was unforeseen but not totally unexpected.
“I just want to emphasize that whenever you are dealing with a three-year project, there are always going to be little blips on the radar that can cause a domino,” said Keefe.
Keefe said the contractors and project team will be working backwards from the latest schedule to try to pick up some days and avoid further disruptions.
“I just wanted to make sure everyone is aware that the good news is the finances still seem to very much line up very favorably, because the bidding environment has been very favorable,” said Keefe. “Tough one … but this is what we sort of, unpleasantly expect, just like when we were planning the high school 10 years ago, there’s always been a little something to come.”
