(UPDATED) With Landslide Vote, It’s ‘Full Steam Ahead’ in Renovation Project

Updated: 12:30 a.m.
If there was any doubt that the community at large supported the need to renovate DePaolo Middle School and Kennedy Middle School, that doubt is certainly gone now.

Voters sent a resounding message to officials Tuesday that they are in support of renovating the two middle schools as over 1,700 turned out to vote on a one question special referendum and approved a $4.725 million increase in the capital budget for the two schools.

With the approval passing as 1,377 voted in favor to just 344 opposed, all efforts now turn to moving forward as work is scheduled to begin June 22 on already approved plans, just one day after the district’s schools close for the summer.

“June 21 is the scheduled last day of school, a Friday,” said Southington School Superintendent Joseph V. Erardi Jr. “The assumption right now is that once class is dismissed, staging will begin and workers will be on site to begin remediation efforts the next day.”

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The project, now valued at $89.725 million, will include extensive remediation of PCBs found in each school. The PCBs, which will cost more than $9 million to remediate, were the primary cause for the town going back to referendum.

Southington Board of Education Chairman Brian Goralski said although “it wasn’t ideal” to go back to referendum for the first time on an already approved project, the resounding turnout and support for the effort shows a clear focus by the community to provide the town’s schoolchildren with a solid education.

“It’s full steam ahead,” Goralski said. “At the end of the day, it’s a message that the community is confident in the work we’ve done and are willing to put their support behind the kids.”

The approval is a best-case scenario for a project that seemed plagued with almost every unexpected challenge imaginable.

In addition to the need to remediate extensive amounts of PCBs not discovered until further testing could be done following the approval of the first referendum for an $85 million project in 2011, the town discovered unaddressed problems with an oil tank that leaked in 1980, was stuck with additional design costs due to architect schematic errors and saw costs soar to more than $99 million.

But rather than give in, Middle School Building Committee Chairman Edward Pocock Jr. said members sharpened their pencils and reduced every unnecessary part of the project to reduce the costs and still maintain the quality necessary to prepare for the future and assure renovations aren’t needed again for at least 40 to 50 years.

A subcommittee led by Christopher Palmieri spent hundreds of hours to address the concerns, he said, eventually settling on value engineering reductions of $10 million.

“It’s been one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as a town official,” Pocock said. “Now we have the approval of the voters, state approvals and we are ready to go out to bid on the project in April. This is behind us and it’s time to move forward.”

Erardi said Tuesday’s vote was crucial in helping the community to continue to move forward and further educational opportunities in town.

“The voters stood extraordinarily tall for our children today, now we need to prove it wasn’t a mistake,” Erardi said. “We need to show them they made the right decision in saying ‘we are all in’ for the kids.”

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