Horry County Board of Education OKs $244,000 for Socastee High track

The Horry County Board of Education approved a measure to spend an additional $244,000 on the Socastee High School track in addition to the $334,861 already spent.

The board unanimously approved the funding at their meeting Monday. The district wants to correct the track’s length so it’s equivalent to all the other S.C. high school tracks, said Joe DeFeo, board chairman.

“This is the only track we had that wasn’t the correct length,” he said.

The board voted to resurface the track in July 2014 at the original cost of $149,520, according to documents from the district.

The track was originally built by parents of students at Socastee High in the early 1980s, DeFeo said. The district isn’t putting any blame on those parents or contractors for the track’s now-defunct state, he added.

“There’s nothing wrong with what they did,” DeFeo said. “It just wasn’t what we would have done."

The district’s facilities committee met earlier this month to discuss several projects, including funding the work on Socastee’s track. The committee voted to send the funding request to the full board.

“It’s going to make Socastee's students feel like they have a level playing field – in more than one way,” said Pamm Timms, district 6 representative.

The board voted to only repave the track in 2014 as a cost-saving measure, but crews soon discovered the poor condition of the track’s base, according to documents sent to the board. The cost of improving the sub grade added $202,487 to the total cost and increased construction time.

“It would have cost a lot more money in the long run if we just resurfaced it without fixing it,” DeFeo said.

The district discovered the track wasn’t wide enough for an adequate number of lanes later that year, which meant Socastee could not hold track events, Mark Wolfe, executive director of facilities, said.

The district also found issues in the quality of workmanship, but already paid the contractor $334,861.

“Most of those issues were cosmetic, because it was all done very quickly,” Wolfe said.

Socastee High students could not use the track during last spring’s track season.

Design engineers for the district determined the track requires an additional $244,240 to fix everything, which brings the total to more than $596,000, documents said..

"Our facilities staff estimates that the project would likely have cost very close to this figure if the project had been bid initially as a complete reconstruction with new subgrade as opposed to a simple resurfacing,” according to the funding consideration document sent to the board.

Wolfe said the new track will hopefully be ready by this spring’s track season. Timms said the almost $600,000 track is worth the cost.

“It’s definitely worth it, for student safety,” Timms said.

This story was originally published September 28, 2015 at 8:46 PM with the headline "Horry County Board of Education OKs $244,000 for Socastee High track."