A letter from Dirk Taylor

The following letter is from Mt. Lebanon resident Dirk Taylor, President of Taylor Structural Engineers, Inc. and member of the CAC.

From: Dirk Taylor
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2011 9:55 AM
To: 'Josephine C. Posti'; 'Edward Kubit'; Daniel Remely; 'Elaine Cappucci'; 'Dale Ostergaard'; 'Lawrence Lebowitz'; 'Faith Ann Stipanovich'; 'Mary Birks'; 'Susan Rose'; 'Timothy Steinhauer'; 'Thomas Peterson'
Subject: High School Renovation

Dear Board Members,

It has been brought to my attention that at this week’s Board meeting you folks voted 7-2 to switch from a single-prime contract to a multiple-prime contract when you rebid the High School Renovation this fall.  Well, I guess that makes it a clean sweep.  You have now effectively rejected every significant recommendation of the CAC.

It is utterly amazing to me how this Board – with virtually no experience in building design and construction – can so easily discard the collective recommendations of eleven well-educated volunteer experts from the community, who brought to your table a combined total of over 300 years of professional experience in building design and construction.  How utterly irresponsible!  (I would like to add that, from personal experience, I’m pretty darn sure the one-and-only School Board member with any significant experience in building renovation – Dan Remely – whom I have known and worked with for nearly two decades, would never have made the kinds of decisions you have made for our High School if he was renovating a building for his business.)  I repeat: how utterly irresponsible of you!

The CAC’s recommendation to go with a single-prime contract was not based on keeping the “bid price” down.  No.  Instead, it was based on keeping the project cost down, as the multiple prime approach almost always results in more additional costs unexpectedly incurred during the construction period due to “coordination disputes” between the various multiple prime contractors who argue that the Construction Documents do not clearly show where one contractor responsibility ends and another contractor responsibility picks up at the thousands of work interfaces that are encountered on big projects like this.  Your own CM, PJ Dick (Dana), clearly stated this at a recent Board Meeting when this issue was being discussed.  But apparently, in a desperate attempt to cheapen up the current design enough to push it through the bidding process – and therefore commit Mt. Lebanon to the project regardless of eventual cost – you managed to get PJ Dick to switch sides on this issue and allow you to commit our community to higher risk of cost overruns during the construction period.  I repeat: how utterly irresponsible of you!

When you combine this with the fact that your current estimate only carries a 5% contingency on such a complicated project, fully knowing from our experiences on the Elementary School projects (and from construction industry standards) that a much higher contingency should be maintained on a project like this, it is very clear that this Board is perfectly content with doing anything and saying anything you can to move your project forward, even though you know it will exceed your “cost cap” sometime during the construction period.  And you are betting on the community, whom you have never allowed a real say in the process, and whom you will present with the cost overruns at a time when the project is “beyond the point of no return,” will have no choice but to allow your over-reaching project to become more expensive at that time.  You folks are like little kids cheating at cards!

In recent months I have tried my best to convince myself that this Board had some integrity, and was trying to what was best for our community – regardless of whether or not you were truly qualified to make such critical decisions.  But your actions over the past two months – including stripping critical elements out of the current design to bring it back within your budget (and not fully disclosing the “stripping process” to the community), thus keeping your project away from a community referendum – have convinced me that you have no integrity, are not competent in making decisions for a project such as this, and are clearly not acting in the best interest of Mt. Lebanon.

If you manage to strip the design enough to have it bid within your budget – and give Mt. Lebanon the most expensive “shell building” in western Pennsylvania – you will be remembered for it.  And when all the other pending, crushing school tax obligations (that you are all well aware of, but continue to mislead the community about) come to fruition, and the very real tax increases that result from those obligations are realized by all of your neighbors in Mt. Lebanon, you will be remembered for it.  And when the shortfalls of this project are realized by the community, about the same time Mt. Lebanon is being faced with cancelling middle school sports, requiring pay-for-play in high school sports, and shutting down many of the programs that diversify our education system due to certain future budget problems, you will be remembered for it.  I hope you can all sleep with that.

Every element pertaining to the education of our students and success of our student-athletes that was included in the Renovation design that bid unsuccessfully in April, can easily be worked into the existing building at far less cost than your over-reaching design that is apparently intended more for “wowing” our neighboring communities than providing the best value for Mt. Lebanon students.  A smart design that renovates the existing facility could also yield 50,000 square feet of excess space that could be minimally renovated and “moth-balled” for possible future use, thus keeping current and future costs down, well below your current plan.  If your attempt to re-bid a stripped-down version of your mistaken show-piece fails again this fall – and I now hope it does – perhaps that might finally convince you to do what is best for Mt. Lebanon, and start on a new path that is based on intelligence, honesty, and integrity.  A true, smart renovation of the current building would give Mt. Lebanon far more than your proposed unnecessary reconstruction, at far less cost.

Sincerely,

Dirk A. Taylor, P.E.
President
Taylor Structural Engineers, Inc.
2275 Swallow Hill Road, Building 100
Pittsburgh, PA 15220