Cost of new Quincy School District central services facility balloons to more than $9 million

QUINCY — The decision to consolidate multiple departments as well as rising costs of materials and construction has turned a new Quincy School District facility into an eight-figure project.

At Wednesday night’s Quincy School Board meeting, board members unanimously voted to accept the low bid from Maas Construction of $7,050,000 to build what is now being called a Central Services Facility.

In March 2022, the School Board matched another buyer’s offer on the building and that following June, the Board voted unanimously to purchase the 50,000 square foot K&L Arena for $2 million.

At the time, Building and Grounds Chairman Richard McNay said the total renovations to convert the former sports complex into a transportation housing and fueling center would cost an additional $1 million.

But McNay also said the district was looking at moving the maintenance and IT departments to the site as well and noted there would be additional costs if that ended up being the final plan.

On Wednesday, McNay confirmed all three departments would indeed be housed at 1600 N. 43rd with the intent to sell the Bus Barn location at 20th and Hampshire and the district’s maintenance department building at 7th and Jersey. McNay said those proceeds would go toward the building costs of the new facility and he hoped the district would garner “high six-figures” in the sale of those properties.

QPS has $1.6 million to put toward the project it has from selling its old school buildings and some of the contents within them. That also includes rebates and cash left over the school construction projects paid for by the 2014 bonding referendum. The remaining needed funding would come from the transportation and operations funds.

The transportation renovations will include overhead doors, wash bays and a fuel depot, which will replace existing fuel depot at Flinn Stadium and the entire 85 bus fleet will be consolidated at the new site, which calls for additional parking lots to be built.

The $7 million is broking down into $4.9 million for the building itself, the site preparation is $1.4 million, the fuel station is $541,000 and there is a $100,000 contingency fund.

McNay detailed the reasons for the cost increase.

“There’s kind of a shortage of (sub-contractors) and everyone’s busy, too,” he said. “Also to remember that over the past two years, due to inflation and shortages and COVID, the cost of materials has risen probably 30 percent…But still, all in all, you look at the square footage of a 50,000 square foot building and you take the $7,050,000 contract and then you take the purchase of the property which was $2.13 million and added together and then divided by the 50,000 square footage, you come up with about $185 a square foot to do this project. And you could not build a building alone by itself with no parking lot for that amount of money.”

The Transportation Department will be housed in the south end of the building and the expected completion date for that is November 1, 2023 and the completion of the Maintenance and IT department’s portion in the north end of the building is May 1, 2024.