Construction continues as school year begins
Summer is over but construction work continues - or is yet to start - in some Juneau schools.
Anchorage Roofing and Contracting is still replacing the roof over much of the Marie Drake building, which is shared by Juneau-Douglas High School and Harborview Elementary. A few buckets sit under leaks in the second-floor hallway, and the building's main doors are closed to student use.
"Ceiling tiles fell the other day," said JDHS science teacher Erik Lundquist on Wednesday, the first day of school. "They haven't fallen lately."
The noisiest work, that of removing the old roof membrane, is done, said schools Facilities Manager Joe Mueller.
The contractor is scheduled to finish by Sept. 17, although Mueller doubts it will do so. Moreover, the city may add the Drake gym roof to the job. It's too early to say what that extra work would do to the completion date, he said.
Bids for the main work, at $651,150, were too high to include doing the gym roof, which would cost an additional $164,925.
Voters on October 2000 funded a number of school repair and renovation projects with $7.7 million in city bonds. The state will reimburse 70 percent of the bond debt and the city will pay for its share of the costs from sales tax revenues.
One of those projects was re-roofing Auke Bay Elementary this summer, which came in under budget. Mueller said the school district hopes to use leftover money to pay for re-roofing the Drake building's gym. The transfer awaits approval from the state Department of Education.
Sometimes projects are delayed by unforeseen circumstances. Contractors also poured new floors for the auxiliary gym at JDHS and the gym at Floyd Dryden Middle School this summer. But the Dryden gym won't be open to students until this week because the project was delayed by 30-year-old crumbling concrete under the former floor.
The contractor, Alaskan Industries of Wasilla, minimized the delay by quickly shipping 25,000 pounds of concrete mix from Seattle, Mueller said. The contractor also forestalled further delay by having the equipment to fix the problem, he said. The extra work added $45,000 in cost to the $242,440 jobs.
Meanwhile, JDHS faces several months of construction work inside to replace a handicapped lift with a ramp, and students are likely to hear some noise from the imminent tear-down of the adjacent state ferry building.
The hallway in the English wing, where the lift is, will remain open through construction of the ramp, said Joe Buck, chief engineer for the city's architecture division.
The ramp will be placed where a classroom now is, next to the stairs, and a new classroom will be created. The lift will be removed only when the ramp is completed, he said. Work on the roughly $60,000 project is expected to last from mid-September to mid-January.
The city expects to give Channel Construction notice to proceed next week on a $450,262 project to tear down the former state ferry building, Buck said. The work should be done in mid-November.
The city couldn't tear down the building in the summer because the state didn't move out until late this week, Buck said.
Why doesn't more school repair work take place in the summer?
City Engineering Director John Stone said although voters approved school-repair bonds last October, the city didn't start collecting sales tax revenues to pay for them until January.
Meanwhile, it can take the city two to three months to write the requests for proposals to design the projects, he said. Then the city advertises the proposals and reviews the bids, and negotiates contracts with the winning designer, which can take another two or three months, he said. It can take two months to get the designs. Then the proposal and bid process cranks up for a contractor.
The city's preparatory work on school construction projects has to be seen in the context of perhaps 50 active projects involving parks, recreation facilities, the hospital and airport, water, streets and sewers, Stone said.
"It's a big balancing act," he said, "because, of course, everybody's project is most important."
Eric Fry can be reached at efry@juneauempire.com.