By PATRICK BLAIS news@woburnonline.com
WOBURN – The City’s Building Committee drained over
$245,000 from WMHS construction reserves recently to offset unaccounted for furniture and equipment costs at the $63 million educational facility.
According to School Business Manager Joseph Elia, city officials recently learned that actual bids for furnishing the new high school exceeded the Building Committee’s previously approved budget by over $400,000.
Specifically, Elia detailed a number of items that weren’t included in the figures presented to the school construction oversight board last February, meaning the $1.8 million furniture, furnishings, and equipment (FF&E) cost estimate really should have been calculated at approximately $2.2 million.
“I think the one big thing we lost sight of in the whole project was the language labs and the library books,” explained the Business Manager, referring to $233,000 worth of expenditures left out of the FF&E figures presented to the Building Committee last winter.
In addition to those two expenses, $125,000 for business machines, $34,000 for a janitorial cleaning lift, and $10,000 for a ride-in lawn mower were also absent from the itemized $1.8 million FF&E budget approved by the group.
Frustrated by the $400,000 oversight, Building Committee member Patricia Mistretta questioned where the authorization came from to add those items into the FF&E budget — especially when the governing authority had only given the green light for $1.8 million worth of expenditures.
Although that authorizing source remained a mystery, as virtually every school and city official shrugged their shoulder at Mistretta’s inquiry, Tappe Architects representative Brook Trivas recalled that the original $1.8 figure was calculated before detailed budgets were prepared on the costs.
In addition, Elia, WMHS Principal Bob Norton, and the city’s furniture consultant, Manuel Tavares of Arlington-based Tavares Design Associates, Inc., claimed that first-glimpse predictions forecasted a FF&E budget of at least $2.57 million.
However, after that budget was determined to far exceed what the city could actually afford, city officials and consultants trimmed that expense plan down to $2.2 million — and then reportedly once again to the $1.8 million cost approved by the Building Committee.
“So in other words, the budget was way underinflated over what was really required?” Mistretta responded.
“You could say that,” Trivas answered. “That is one way of putting it. But [the FF&E budget] was really put together as something that was seen as financially realistic for the city.”
We need $245,000
Although the originally agreed $1.8 million FF&E budget had been thrown out-of-whack by nearly $400,000, Elia and Norton lobbied the group to approve only $245,000 worth of those costs by tapping the WMHS contingency account.
The contingency account, a financial construction cushion established for unseen expenditures, contained about $600,000 at the time, meaning the $245,000 withdrawal would leave approximately $355,000 in the fund.
“What we’re dealing with for all these items, are actual things in the classroom. So you’re really talking about the guts of the educational programs,” the WMHS Principal said of the $245,000 request, which would pay for $147,000 for language lab equipment and $86,000 for library books, among other purchases.
According to the city’s Deputy Auditor John Danizio, if the city receives all of its grant and utility bill reimbursements for the new WMHS — and only tap the contingency account in the future for planned expenditures — the Building Committee should have $810,000 for facility add-ons once the high school project is completed.
Since last winter, the Building Committee has held-out hope that enough money will remain in the high school reserves to cover the cost for an artificial surface practice-playing field, an estimated $600,000 expenditure.
Agreeing with Norton’s assessment of the $245,000 funding request, Mistretta believed that the Building Committee had little choice but to approve the reserve account withdrawal.
However according to the McLaughlin appointee, she had strong concerns about whether additional “miscommunications” would be brought before the Building Committee in the future.
“I get nervous now with the fact that there’s something missing, a quarter of a million dollars here. How do we know that come September, we won’t be missing something else?” the Building Committee member vented.
“I’ve looked at this [$245,000] line-item by line-item. And it is all instructional, so there’s really nothing we can do,” Mistretta later admitted.
