By Adam Swift
There is still a possibility that the new Revere High School could be completed and open for students by the fall of 2028.
But that would require a number of factors, including mild winters and the bidding process to finish up soon so foundation work can get underway, to become a reality, according to Brian Dakin of owner’s project manager LeftField.
Dakin appeared before the city council to provide an update on the high school building project on Monday night. He fielded questions about the soil issues that have set back the timeline for the project as well as the current timeline.
The $400 million-plus, four-story school at the Wonderland is being paid for in part through a grant from the Massachusetts School Building Authority.
“A lot has happened over the last number of months; Phase One site prep and demolition is complete and we are also 100 percent complete with all environmental permitting at the local, state, and federal levels,” said Dakin. “Through the late fall into winter, most of the focus has been on a very large soil operation; soil handling, sorting, exporting to landfills, etc. We’ve also begun setting underground utilities, stormwater utilities, getting ready for mechanical utilities in the coming months.”
In the last several months, Dakin said there has been a focus on ground improvements which include prepping the areas of the site for building roads, paths and retaining walls. In addition, that work includes prepping the area around the footprint of the building to be able to transition into excavations for the building foundations this month.
“From a high level, we have awarded about a third of the project prior to the last few months,” said Dakin. “That third of the project encompassed the site work contractors, concrete, and structural steel … and we are about 13 percent complete with that early work, which puts us overall about 4 percent complete for construction for the whole building.”
As the project transitions into heavier construction work in the coming months, Dakin said there will be existing conditions surveys done for abutters within 250 feet of the project.
“Those abutters will be seeing certified letters in the mail to request at their discretion a survey of the exterior and/or interior of their house at no cost so that any future potential claims based on heavy construction and machinery can be better addressed,” said Dakin.
Dakin also addressed how all the soil handling on the 33-acre Wonderland site.
“It starts with geotechnical; when we were bidding structure, earthwork last summer … a number of the bidders, especially the low bidders, had some concern with how they were going to achieve the design settlement criteria,” said Dakin. “That sent the project down a pretty deep wormhole of testing various pockets of soil for geotechnical capabilities.”
Because of contaminated soil on the site, Dakin said the process identified that the project team would have to dig deeper and move a lot more dirt than was originally planned.
“Once we know we’re digging it up, we then have to test it for geo-environmental purposes,” said Dakin. “All that testing led to a whole lot more soil exporting to various landfill facilities than we had anticipated and had the net result of pushing the project schedule back by three to four months.”
Through discussions with the city’s high school building committee, the current schedule no longer shows an opening of the summer of 2028 for the new school, Dakin said.
“We’re now trending towards the building being substantially complete in November of 2028 and allowing for a potential holiday move into the new building,” said Dakin. “We are doing everything we can to recoup that time. Some of us are still believers that if the right things happen in the coming year or year and a half, we will be able to get back on the original schedule.”
On the financial side of the project, Dakin said the remainder of the project over the last few months has been out to bid and bid results are in and being analyzed.
“We are not outside of the point where things like bid protests can happen, so we have not released the bid results yet,” said Dakin. “We will be ready to review those bid results in a draft final construction contract with the school building committee this month. The schedule is to bring the final construction contract with a Chapter 149a job, that is called a GMP, a guaranteed maximum price contract; we’ll have that ready for the school building committee to review it and potentially approve it in April.”
Dakin said he could appear before the city council again in May when there are more solid final numbers from the bidding process for an update.
“I think the project will be in a position, based on the initial bid results to achieve the financial goals we have been given by the city, the mayor, and the school building committee of bettering the budget,” said Dakin. “So we are in very good shape on the financial side of the update and we did lose some time on soil handling operations.”
The city council initially approved an overall project budget of $492 million for the project, and later requested that $10 million be trimmed from the total project budget.
Councillor-at-Large Robert Haas III asked what would have to happen to make the summer of 2028 completion date a reality again.
“A lot of things would have to happen, and I think that is why you would get two slightly different answers if you were asking the contractor and you were asking us as the (owner’s project manager),” said Dakin.
The project would have to get out of the bidding process as soon as possible with no protests and be able to execute the guaranteed maximum price contract in April, Dakin said.
“We’re then talking about not running into any lead time issues,” said Dakin. “We think we are ahead of that with all the big mechanical equipment.”
There would also have to be no local to the site natural disasters such as heavy snowstorms or flooding.
“If all of that falls into place, we could dial the schedule back,” said Dakin. “It would take a year, a year and a half to get that resolution. We really want to put half of the job in the ground and have half of the risk gone so we can start making those projections; but we need not many storms, we need short winters, and we need no surprises on the supply chain side.”