New school to cost less than expected

• By C.J. FUTCH
• Advocate River parishes bureau
• Published: Jul 8, 2009 - Page: 5B

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Bad news for the economy became good news for Ascension Parish schools when bids on their most recent project, a new primary school for Orange Grove subdivision in Sorrento, came back, a school system official said Tuesday.

Chad Lynch, director of planning and construction for the school system, said the low bid for the project, $9.798 million, came in $4 million under the projected $13,672,505 budgeted for the project.

MBD Construction Inc.’s bid for Orange Grove was approved at the School Board’s Monday meeting. Also at the meeting, the Sorrento Town Council submitted a request to name the Orange Grove subdivision school, Sorrento Primary. This issue will likely be taken up at the July 21 meeting, said Johnnie Balfantz, a school system spokesman.

The school in Orange Grove subdivision development is among the last of the current wave of building projects funded by a 2005 bond initiative, Lynch said.

“We expected the cost to go up,” Lynch said of the Orange Grove project. In fact, the School Board voted to increase the original budget from just over $12 million to $13.7 million when construction costs steadily rose after hurricanes Katrina and Gustav, he said.

Lynch said the school system has been using the same basic building plan for the last several school construction projects. “We’ve built this school for as low as $7 million — Duplessis (in 2002) — and as high as $13.3 million,” he said.

Lynch said the winning bid for Lakeside Primary School in Galvez, which is slated to open this fall, was $13 million. That bid came in $3 million over budget when it was accepted in February 2008, he said.

Lynch credits the happy surprise on the Orange Grove school to the decline in the economy.

“For a project like this, we’d typically have four or five bidders on the contract,” Lynch said. “For this project, we had 15. Contractors are going after projects they normally wouldn’t bid on. They’re struggling to get work,” he said.