Projects at Prior Lake-Savage elementary schools delayed due to high bids

Prior Lake American

Projects at Five Hawks, Glendale, Jeffers Pond and Redtail Ridge elementary schools have been delayed after bids came back too high for the projects.

The Prior Lake-Savage Area School Board originally voted to put the projects up for bid by contractors during a meeting on Feb. 12. Bids opened on April 3 for construction to start in June. The projects include additions or renovations to Five Hawks and Glendale and additional classrooms at Redtail Ridge and Jeffers Pond.

With the short amount of time from the referendum in November to the bidding in April to construction in June and school districts competing for the same contractors, the prices were too high, Business Services Executive Director Julie Cink said at a facilities, finance and long-range planning committee meeting on Monday.

“From the time we were able to pass the referendum and go through the design process ... that all takes time for us to come up with the final design of what that building is going to be,” Cink said.

The projects would have been done to help address overcrowding at the elementary levels.

“We’ll continue to lean into the short-term capacity strategies that we had and I feel confident we’re going to be able to manage that,” Superintendent Teri Staloch said. “We’re still really confident that we’ve got some opportunities ... to handle the capacity issues there.”

Voters in the Prior Lake-Savage Area School District approved a $109.3 million bond referendum in November to cover the cost of a new elementary school, a new building for Bridges Area Learning Center, a two-story addition to Prior Lake High School and six other school additions.

Due to the high bids, the smaller projects at Five Hawks and Glendale will go out to bid again in May for construction slated to begin in the summer if reasonable bids come back, whereas the Jeffers Pond and Redtail Ridge projects will be rolled into larger projects later on, such as the WestWood and Edgewood remodeling project, with construction starting next spring.

“This is a very aggressive timeline going up for bids,” Assistant Superintendent Jeff Holmberg said. “Much of the feedback we received from folks we were bidding was that it was very late in the season for some of those projects.”

With construction of the new elementary school being delayed one year and now expected to open in 2020, space is running low in the elementary schools and is likely to stay that way, board member Mary Frantz said.

“We’re all in this together and the most important thing that we wanted to do is make sure there’s space for our kids,” Frantz said. “With the purchase agreement with the elementary school still not in place ... and now this, I think we probably need to get a little bit more involved.”

Holmberg said there had been involvement throughout in the process.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the process that we have,” Holmberg said. “We truly believe this is a timing issue with this.”

Rejecting a bid that comes in too high is common sense, board member Lee Shimek said.

“We do have a budget on each project that’s been published ... as far as what our plan is, we’re working on a plan now,” Shimek said. “We were hoping for a lower bid, we didn’t get it. To me, it’s simple — it if comes in high, we’re going to have to reject it.”

The board is hoping to have a binding purchase agreement for the property for the new elementary school in the next few months, Staloch said.