Saurabh Dani emailed the Ridgewood school board:
LAN Associates provided a document yesterday at the tour of Somerville school, which estimated the projected cost of the referendum FOR Somerville school to be $6,180,410.
This cost is estimated to the last dollar amount, and then during the tour, he mentioned that he is not yet certain which boiler is he going to recommend for Somerville (i.e. standard efficiency or high efficiency). How did LAN arrive at a dollar amount, without those details?
Our school board needs to put a pause on this LAN associates led effort immediately, and prioritize/forced rank projects, identify top 3-4 projects for this year – bid them out to INDEPENDENT contractors – who are NOT associated with LAN – and then put a referendum question for just those top priority projects in April. This way they are going to be borrowing what’s needed, and not borrowing excess amounts.
Then repeat this process every year for *required* / *needed* projects for that specific year. If something was suggested by EI Associates in 2015 and will be done in 2024 as per the current plan of the mega referendum, it’s not “urgent’.
LAN Associates was chosen without a bid process, and they will be paid a good percentage of this project – AND – they will be the ones choosing contractors for final work. 70M is a lot of money to be given to one contractor or its associates without exploring all available options.
The point in the last paragraph is the key one: they get a percentage of the construction costs. So they will over-design, choose the most lavish options, and select contractors who know how the game is played. This School Board is shameless.
LAN gets 13.5% and they said by law they have to open the bid to all contractors, BUT they will notify their chosen contractors and let them know that the bid is available. So, all others will get short amount of time to bid, but their go-to guys would have a better chance to win.