The Gillett School Board approved an updated 10-year buildings and grounds capital improvements plan March 20 and immediately OK’d the first major expense on the list.
Under state law, a school board with an approved long-term capital improvement plan (minimum of 10 years) may establish a “trust” known as Fund 46 that is funded with a transfer from the general fund.
Board member Jamie Heroux, who chairs the building and grounds committee, said Superintendent Nathan Hanson and Scott Krause, maintenance director, reviewed the district’s previous five-year plan and produced the update.
The committee reviewed the new 10-year plan as a guideline for future projects and set about deciding possible projects that could be funded with the current balance, Heroux said.
The top two priorities were upgrading or replacing the air conditioning at Gillett Elementary School and a switch gear in the portion of Gillett Secondary School that was built in the 1960s, he said. A switchgear is a vital component of a building’s electric distribution system.
Given enough funds to implement only one of the priority projects, the committee recommended the switchgear.
“Our concern is that if part of that switchgear fails, we would lose power to the gymnasium and most of the and 1920s and 1960s parts of the building, which would basically mean that we couldn’t have school in those parts of the building,” Heroux said. “Just a workaround could take weeks, if you could get one.”
Pieper Power, an electrical contractor from Park Falls, received the contract to do the required work for $189,350, in part because it estimated a 10-week lead time to acquire the parts, while two other bidders said it could take up to a year.
“They looked at the building as a whole rather than just that switchgear and they said over in the 1990s part of the building we have a 2,000-amp feed that’s being underutilized — it’s more than big enough to put a patch panel in the 1960s part of the building and feed it from that feed,” Heroux said. “It would have an additional benefit that we wouldn’t have two power feeds for that area, we’d just have the one from the 1990s.”
Hanson said the existing switchgear “is huge and it’s so outdated that we tried to see if we could rebuild it, so we had people come in to look at it, and the parts are so outdated that they really can’t, they have to replace the whole thing.”
Heroux estimated that the old switchgear is 1.5 meters wide by 2 meters high. He said the bid increased by $4,500 after the committee made its recommendation, because the price of copper is skyrocketing. The proposal was to approve the contract now to lock in the price and keep school open if something goes wrong, he said.
Hanson noted that the other two bidders would probably also need to raise their price because of copper.
Now that the plan is updated, school officials will continue to review potential projects.
“It’s really important when you look at this list to know that none of these things are locked in as ‘they have to happen,’” Hanson said. “We know that repairs come up, we know that things have to be prioritized as we go, this is really just a very loose projection on things that we know we want to look at, continue to try to work on and stay ahead of.”
Board member Cliff Gerbers said the district will soon be making last big payment on a long-term loan.
“The district borrowed $6 million to do repairs that we hadn’t done for a lot of years,” Gerbers said. “Somehow we have to get this 10-year plan to where we can keep up with that stuff. Once you get behind in maintenance — as you found out this year — you’re done. We have to have a plan to maintain the facility.”
Heroux said Krause is in the process of developing a districtwide maintenance schedule.
wbluhm@newmedia-wi.com
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