Our D200 school board has just approved the Project 2 Bid Results & Credits for a total of $80,580,629.00; we’d previously approved this budget for the project, but now we’re accepting actual bids, which means they can start work. No turning back now. (This is for a major facilities project, for those who aren’t local to me.)
I suspect it’s the largest amount of money I’ll be asked to authorize spending in my life.
I’m not normally someone who chooses to spend money on buildings, rather than people; this isn’t why I ran for school board, to support this kind of project – but in this particular case, after literally hundreds of hours reviewing the rationale and detailed plans for the project, I’m happy to vote yes on this one.
The building is around a hundred years old, it’s been patched and repaired for a very long time, and the patches are starting to really not work for our students and their current needs (for just one example, they literally *can’t* make parts of the building properly accessible within the current structure, because of where the HVAC has to go right now). I’m afraid it’s time.
I just wish we could’ve authorized it pre-pandemic, when it would have cost significantly less. Ah well.