BY ABBY FOX

Last Wednesday, school and town officials were slapped with $140,596.87 worth of change order requests from Fleet Construction Company and Geisser Engineering Corporation, and invoices from John P. Caito Corporation, for the school athletic fields project.

“I think it surprised everybody,” Town Manager Bill Sequino said. On the other hand, “It seems to be par for the course for this project. What’s disappointing is some of the work [from change orders] has already been done,” Sequino added, effectively trapping the town’s hands. “So you’re essentially asking council to approve change orders for work that has already been done.”

Many of them, school and town officials said, they weren’t anticipating and were done without Project Manager Ernie DiSaia running the orders by them first. For example, School Committee Chair Jean Ann Guliano said DiSaia approved a $4,914.28 order for more paving and $4,088.6 for more swale, as well as Geisser’s testing.

The most surprising item was a $40,545.75 change order from contractor John P. Caito, because it requested reimbursement for things like letters drafted to Town Manager Bill Sequino and meetings with the fields committee. (The charge for correspondence alone costs more than $2,000, according to invoices obtained from the school district.) Caito’s in particular Guliano said she would look over with Public Works Director Joe Duarte in more detail. “We disputed some of the items as being already included in the work he was doing,” she said. “It was my understanding once we approved past invoices, that that covered anything to do with the Rhode Island Department of Education,” she said. “There’s all kinds of things in there we’re going to look through and see if they’re additional charges or included in the contract. Some things don’t seem to entail construction management, such as letters drafted to Sequino.

The change orders “were all a surprise,” she said, “except for the pump station,” for $21,737.22, which Fleet asked for. “The process is not being followed, and that’s what’s troubling,” she said. And, “I just don’t think he [Di Saia] likes working with Joe,” she said, but “Joe is the point person.”

Sequino was also adamant about the change orders. “Some of them are completely out-of-line,” he said. “It appears that the engineering firm [Caito] is just listing anytime they do something and my question to them is who authorized this work, and I didn’t get an answer to this question. Not that it’s my project; it’s a school project.” It’s up to the school committee to go over the change orders before the town council takes the issue up, he said.

The most egregious change order, to Sequino, was the one where Caito charged for writing letters. “I think that’s outrageous,” he said.

Joe Duarte, serving as the town’s liaison between the town and schools and DiSaia and contractors, agreed that “Quite a few of them were new to me. There’s always discussion [taking place, but] you don’t know if they’re going to result in a change order. For awhile, they were giving me all the change orders and then, all of a sudden I didn’t receive any additional information. I saw the list for the first time [at Wednesday’s meeting] and I was kind of surprised. I try to go to the construction meetings and they don’t keep me in the loop completely. I was kind of surprised on some of those.”

Caito’s in particular “came out of nowhere,” he said.

The issue, to Duarte, boils down to communication. “Jean Ann Guliano made it clear they needed somebody to step in and consult on things going on and they chose me to do that,” he said, but, “I have not always been advised on things. I got thrown into this in the 11^th hour, and there’s a lot of detail that requires a lot of time. You expect people to fill you in on things and that communication has been negligible. All the projects I do are transparent. I guess I’m an outsider coming into the team and I haven’t been told what’s going on. I try to my best to keep up with it.

“There are many pages of drawings, of specifications, and it’s almost impossible for any one individual to know full details and they assume because you went to a meeting, the information was fully disclosed, and that’s not the case,” he went on. “You count on these people to fill you in and when the communications stop, you’re not always aware. I’ve never had a project like that. Every project I run, if people don’t [communicate], then see you later.

“It gets frustrating,” Duarte concluded. “You try to do a good job for the community and you’re left out.”

Other change orders, such as a $1,650.22 flow test and a $21,737.22 change order for a Booster Pump Station, both from Fleet Construction, were not surprises, though Guliano said she and others were looking for additional information about the pump size. By the end of last Wednesday’s meeting, the only items the field construction committee was comfortable approving was $12,526.30, for testing they had asked Geisser to do, and for gates between the high school and Meadowbrook Farms Elementary, totaling $19,600.

Officials are also looking for clarification on Fleet’s Handicap Accessibility change order for $55,134.64, including walkways, because it wasn’t clear to them why this seemed to be done “last-minute,” Guliano said. “It seems odd we didn’t get a design that was up to ADA specs,” school committee member Deidre Gifford agreed at Tuesday’s committee meeting.

School committee meeting

The bids are in for the new Cole Junior High and they are low, reported project manager Jon Winikur to the school committee Tuesday night. The low-bidder, Gilbane Building Company, brought in a “terrific” $22,750,000- bid, far under the budget of $30,120,000, and the company is submitting a proposed contract Monday, he said. The next highest bids were four in the $24,000,000 range and one at more than $27,000,000. “This is beyond my expectations,” he said. “We worked it and it came together ideally.”

Town councilor Henry Boezi was at the meeting and he enthused that Gilbane is “one of the top contractors, a first-class company,” and “top-shelf.”

Nov. 16 is the construction start date and 16 months later is the deadline for a new middle school in East Greenwich, he said.

The other major construction project is front entrance rehabilitation of the high school, a $3 million budgeted project and five general contractors have been pre-qualified for that, with bids due Oct. 27, Winikur said.

Building fee debate

In other news, the school committee plans to go back to the drawing board on the building fee issue, after Jack Sommer came to Tuesday’s meeting speaking against not having a breakdown in fees for residents versus non-residents. It’s not fair to charge market rates to people living and paying taxes in town, he said, while out-of-towners should be charged above the committee’s proposed $55-an-hour fee, maybe as much as $85. The committee supported the $55 rate months ago after agreeing with Facilities Director Bob Wilmarth that the schools should try to recover some utility and custodian costs from building renters.