A Site to Behold

Construction at Waterford High School has been in the news a lot lately and it’s not often been good. Now, however, the project seems to have taken a turn for the better.

After laboring under a number of violations issued by the town, the construction site is finally officially out of the woods. At last night’s School Building Committee meeting, Waterford School Superintendent Jerome Belair reported that Environmental Planner Maureen Fitzgerald is now satisfied that “all corrective actions have been successfully completed.”

Indeed, construction is progressing at a rapid pace. Structural steel and cinderblock walls are beginning to give form to the new school building and roof trusses are being put into place. Many of the concrete slabs have been poured, and slabs will be poured for the second and third floors in the first week of November.  

If the new building construction still leaves something to the imagination, the renovations to existing buildings offer a good idea of what the finished school will look like. Waterford School Building Committee members, who took a tour of the construction on October 18, were visibly impressed by what they saw.

They gasped with pleasure at the sight of the new bleachers and were delighted to see the location for the elevator that would enable everyone to reach even the top tiers. A number of them couldn’t resist kneeling down to feel the newly-laid soft green artificial turf of the multipurpose athletic field.

Inside the buildings, freshly painted walls are a soothing camel color, which matches the new carpet, the ceiling, and the dark wood doors. The fieldhouse has been transformed with tastefully-tiled shower rooms and new fixtures. Some of the old, battered, and graffiti-covered yellow lockers are still there as a reminder of what it used to look like but soon they’ll all be replaced with spacious new blue ones.   

Most importantly, the structural and code issues have been dealt with. The building has been rewired, the concrete wall of the pool that was crumbling because the rebar supports within it had rusted is now fixed, and the pool has been repaired. Though G&G Industries Project Manager Gus Kotait said he still has a punch list that’s about nine pages long, the fieldhouse is just days away from being finished.

Remaining Issues

As with any construction project, there are still issues that pop up when least expected. At last night’s Building Committee meeting, for instance, members had to approve additional money to drill four holes for the football field lights. Apparently, the original bid for the lights didn’t include the cost of digging the 21 foot deep, 48 inch round holes needed for the light poles (which, by the way, requires two days of Buffalo drilling at $16,225 a day).

The Committee was able to find savings elsewhere, however. Discovering that they didn’t need to have fire doors in some locations saved about $5,000, for instance. Committee members also voted to buy the Magnum Light Plants that until now had been rented to provide light to the site. Those are expensive at $19,531 apiece but buying these powerful but portable lights is about $10,000 cheaper than renting them for the next two years, and they’ll be useful well beyond that.

The Committee also balked at the $124,706 cost of replacing the tennis court lights, deciding instead to explore other alternatives. “No one wants to spend that much!” said Committee Chair Alan Wilensky.