The air conditioning project for Bowling Green City Schools is coming in under budget and on time.
That means all district buildings will have air conditioning when classes start in August.
The completion date is Aug. 12, said Superintendent Francis Scruci.
“The contracts have been moving along very well,” said Tim Lehman, chief engineering office with Fanning Howey.
At its meeting Tuesday, the district’s board of education approved a change order valued at $216,182 for the HVAC improvement project, as the scope of the work increased after the bid was accepted.
The additional work will include modifications necessary to meet code compliance, the addition of bipolar ionization that was omitted from the initial design, and additional split units at all three sites.
Prior to this project, the only buildings in the district that were air conditioned were the middle school and Crim Elementary.
Mini splits are being added at Kenwood and Conneaut elementaries and the high school.
The mini-split units will provide air conditioning to each classroom, but not ventilation. They can be moved if new facilities are built.
Earl Mechanical Services Inc., Wauseon, presented the low bid of $3.3 million to add the mini spits to Kenwood and Conneaut elementaries and the high school.
The district is using $2.5 million in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds to pay for the project with the balance coming from the capital improvement fund.
Lehman said he is seeing a lot of districts who bid later than Bowling Green have double the costs, plus delivery issues.
He said 167 mini splits are being installed, along with six rooftop units.
Even with the additional costs, “it is still substantially underneath the original cost of the budget,” Lehman said.
The project budget was $4 million, said Fanning Howey Project Executive Dan Obrynba.
With the change order, the cost is now $3.524 million, still almost 12% below the budgeted amount, he said.
With soft costs of $352,700 – these include permits and service fees — the total project will cost around $3.8 million, Obrynba said.
The board also took the final step necessary to place a combined income tax/bond issue on the November ballot for a new high school.
The issue includes a $49 million bond issue and an 0.5% income tax, which will collected $70 million for the new school.
A 3.9-mill property tax will be collected for 30 years to pay off the bonds, with the 0.5% income tax increase for seven years.
Calculations show the property tax would cost $136.39 annually for the owner of a home valued at $100,000. Someone with the district’s median income of $66,215 would pay $331 a year in income tax.
A maintenance fund is built into the income tax collection.
