Board approves new budget for North Myrtle Beach High School renovations

The Horry County School Board on Monday approved an updated project budget for North Myrtle Beach High School renovations.

The $21 million project budget previously approved by the board in June 2015 included a renovated library, student parking, landscaping and pond development, upgrades to the school auditorium and an elevator replacement.

Monday’s updated budget is still $21 million and includes the new student parking, auditorium upgrades, renovated science labs, an additional $649,000 for environmental remediation and some landscaping in the front of property.

The pond wasn’t included, and neither were the elevator replacement nor the new library. The library was last renovated in 2003, and Horry County Schools Coordinator of Design Mark Koll said there was “a lot of useful life there.”

The project uses what the district calls an “integrated product delivery” method, meaning the district, architecture firm and contractor are working together during the design and construction.

“What we did was we worked back and forth on design issues, code issues, construct-ability and costing, and then worked out a methodology to get to that series of recommendations tonight,” Koll said.

During an Aug. 22 facility committee meeting, Distict 1 Representative Holly Heniford raised concerns about an updated budget from the project’s architect firm UWPD. Heniford had obtained the updated budget dated Aug. 19 that showed the library as “work deleted.”

The Aug. 19 UWPD budget was not approved by the board and included some additional items that the school had asked for if there was money available as well as some items that had not been requested by the school, such as a larger auditorium workshop.

UWPD Architecture CEO Steve Usry said that to stay within budget, some items had to be taken off and that the budget was just his recommendation for how best to spend the $21 million. He said the original budget plus the additional work items totaled $25 million, but could not provide a schedule of values showing an itemized list of the cost of all the work items totaling $25 million.

During Monday’s meeting, Heniford asked Koll how much the auditorium workshop cost and why she hadn’t been able to see the schedule of values totaling $25 million.

“What’s difficult about that, is it’s a pricing that looks at the entire project, 250-some-odd thousand square feet,” Koll said. “It’s difficult to hone in just on the back of the auditorium and say that piece is worth ‘X,’ because it’s not priced that way. It’s priced ‘X’ amount of flooring, ceiling, demolition, equipment. To get the pricing that you’re really looking for, you have to take that and put it back together to make sense of what the pieces cost.”

Koll said the auditorium workshop had been expanded because it was inexpensive square footage to add.

“It was some cheap area in the building that made sense from a design and a building usage, and the school really needed that space,” Koll said, although Heniford has said the school didn’t ask for the expanded workshop.

“The original programmed expansion was support space to the back side of the auditorium,” he said. “And because of the configuration of that expansion and existing parts of the building, we in essence built one wall and a piece of a roof to collect up what would have been an interior unusable courtyard in the building.”

Koll said that the district can work with the contractor and architecture firm to produce a schedule of values for the work now that the updated project budget had been approved by the board.

“I’m just glad we’ve finally gotten to this point and we can move forward,” he said.

This story was originally published September 19, 2016 at 11:05 PM with the headline "Board approves new budget for North Myrtle Beach High School renovations."