School's Overruns Offer Lesson for Repairs

As a result, the Corps put the project out for construction bids when designs were far from complete. The joint venture of James G. Davis Construction Corp. and HRGM Corp. won the bid.

Shortly after construction began in 2002, the design problems became apparent, records show. Contractors soon swamped the Corps and the architects with requests that drawings be clarified, which led to changes in the design. In one change that cost $198,000, contractors were forced to replace 36,000 square feet of ceiling because McKissack's plan to remove certain walls had left it unstable, Corps construction records show.

"This change is considered attributable to designer error," the records said.

Condit said in an interview that the change was not the firm's fault and that it was unrealistic to expect that McKissack, working at a rushed pace, would be able to analyze the physical condition of the entire building before drawing the plans. He said the same was true in other cases where the Corps attributed construction change orders to design problems.

He said his firm didn't have the original McKinley blueprints to work with because they could not be found.

Corps records say that corridors were misaligned and that sinks were placed where there were no water lines, problems "considered attributable" to McKissack. In all, the Corps records attribute about half the costs of the change orders to oversights by McKissack.

Condit said "we think we did a great job" and disagreed with the Corps' assessment. Missing sink lines, for example, were due to the fact that the firm was told by the Corps to issue incomplete drawings, Condit said.

Errors by McKissack account for less than 1 percent of the construction cost, Condit said. Most of the changes were caused by unforeseen conditions "in a large building that had seen years of neglect," he said.

"The original contract price . . . was not intended to be the final budget," and many of the changes classified as omissions were "completely necessary to build this project," he said.

Taken together, the roughly $11 million in change orders drove up construction costs by more than 20 percent, far above the 5 percent the Corps budgeted for modifications on the project.

The Corps declined to comment on the change orders, saying they are only preliminary assessments of responsibility.

School board member William Lockridge (District 4), who pushed for the audit, said "somebody owes the school system money . . . because the school system should not have to pay for cost overruns caused by companies that didn't do good or complete work."

He said the Corps should have presented change orders to the school board and questioned whether the board adequately reviewed the drawings before the project was put out for construction bids.

The funding picture also was clouded by the expectation that private donors would add millions to the project. That didn't happen, and city officials abandoned plans to help develop the campus. As construction costs climbed, Corps managers and school officials slashed planned features.

A refurbished grandstand and a walkway between buildings were eliminated. Electronic presentation boards for every classroom were cut. An entire wing that was meant to be privately funded stands empty.

The lesson for future projects is to do more careful, realistic planning, said Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund, which monitors school spending and is under contract to help the system with planning.

"Where you make your expensive mistakes is not when you get to construction," she said. "It is at the beginning."

Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.