Architect: Referendum Projects Would Take Three Summers to Finish

If the Fort Lee Board of Education’s $30.2 million school bond referendum passes on Jan. 24, it would set in motion a process that would “roll out over a period of time” beginning this summer, says the school district’s architect of record.

With most of the capital improvement, renovation and construction work needing to get done when students are not in school, that means it would most likely take the next three summers to complete all of the work, with priority projects like boiler replacements starting this summer, said Jeanne K. Perantoni of SSP Architectural Group at the school board’s community forum meeting Tuesday.

“The overall build out of the program will take a couple years to get through to everything in a prioritized fashion,” Perantoni said. “We will hit a few this first summer. The second summer we’ll have a lot of things happen, and there actually will be some work that will trickle into a third year.”

Factoring into the equation is the fact that some projects like boiler replacements are also relatively simple—in addition to being priorities—and don’t take a lot of time in development, while other projects take longer to develop and gain the necessary approvals, she added.

“I should say right now, the plan will be done in conjunction,” Perantoni said. “Once the referendum passes, our first series of weeks and months are actually sitting down with the key personnel—Jack [Denichilo] and his whole forces—so everything will be customized based on that. We have a target in our back pocket for what we think makes the most sense. We will absolutely be sitting down to confirm that with the schools and the leadership within the district.”

Perantoni said the first summer—the summer of 2012—would see “the top four” priority projects get done: boiler replacements at and , repainting at and the middle school and masonry work at the high school.

“It’s really a three-year cycle, but summer number two will be probably the heaviest one,” Perantoni said. “Summer number one will be the top priority projects, and the third summer will be the [the remainder of the work].”

She also said there’s an advantage to doing “this type of project over a bit of time.”

“You’re not hitting the market all at once; then you have a scarcity of [bidders] allowing the work to be specialized,” she said. “We’re also looking at ways to kind of group the projects together so that we can get greater efficiency. We have roofing projects on multiple schools; we actually put a package together that we not only would have one [company], but maybe one that has two or three partners … there’s always a crunch that we really want to maximize our time during the summer.”