By Adam Swift
Last week’s meeting of the Revere High School Building Committee was largely a bookkeeping affair, as committee members discussed details of future project invoicing and the goals of the building subcommittees as the project moves forward.
The project to build a new $490 million-plus high school at Wonderland is currently in the design development phase, which is slated to last through the end of the calendar year, according to Brian Dakin of owner’s project manager LeftField.
“The end of January is when we will have a series of presentations summarizing the design,” said Dakin. “We will have the estimates done, we will be confirming that we are on budget, and we will be further through permitting.”
While the eight-month design development phase runs through January, Dakin said the design parameters of the project will need to be locked down with dollar values by the beginning of December.
“Then, we will hand off all of that data to teams of estimators,” said Dakin.
LeftField, project architect Perkins Eastman, and construction manager Consigli will work with those estimators through the holidays to prepare for the January presentations.
Once the design development is completed and the numbers are in place, the construction document phase will begin as the project works toward being bidded out for construction.
Dakin said LeftField was planning to meet with city finance director Richard Viscay and his staff to go through the project budget line by line.
One of the goals of those meetings will be to make sure the software and budget tracking is compatible between the city, the project team, and the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA).
Dakin said LeftField will be tracking the budget to make sure the city is reimbursed all it is due through the MSBA grants.
“As we settle into the monthly finance meetings, this is going to be a big topic … just making sure we get the money back from the MSBA,” said Dakin.
Dakin also highlighted the high school building subcommittees which have started meeting over the past several weeks.
“A lot of these meetings are going to be what drives content for building committee updates,” said Dakin. “We anticipate next month having a little more intensive of an update about design and the site.”
The subcommittees include the design working group, site campus and athletics, site utilities, city planning, IT, and finance.
The focus of the recent IT subcommittee was on bringing internet fiber to the Wonderland site.
“It appears that the plan is to have the city’s fiber vendor bring in a line from (the Paul Revere School),” said Dakin. “We need to bring the fiber loop that all city services run on down to Wonderland.”
