The new Clarendon Hills Middle School will boast myriad amenities: a state-of-the-art applied-technology lab, computer and video hookups in every classroom and a “cafetorium,” a combination auditorium and cafeteria connected by a stage.
But the school also will have a not-so-impressive feature: a $17 million price tag–32 percent higher than what Hinsdale School District 181 voters were told it would cost. In fact, the school, on Chicago Avenue, will cost taxpayers about $198 per square foot, 58 percent more than the average cost of a middle school in the Midwest, according to School Planning & Management, which publishes an annual national school construction report.
District officials and school board members were reluctant to comment on the $4.2 million cost overrun or assign blame. Tom Ryan, business manager for the district, said he did not have time to answer detailed questions.
But Bruce Davidson, a former school board member who opposed construction of the school from the outset, said district officials’ poor planning and a rush to “get the project moving” are the root causes.
“It’s an embarrassment,” said Davidson, who left the board in November after six years. “I think there is a real possibility that the taxpayers are getting fleeced, and I think the board has a responsibility to investigate the problem and find out where things went wrong.”
Davidson tried to get the board to look into the escalating costs in October when he suggested an independent investigator be brought in. Davidson’s motion died after no one on the school board seconded it.
Ryan said the district will pay for the $4.2 million excess with “internal funds” and with $2 million in certificates of participation, bank loans that must be paid back from internal funds and cannot be repaid through a tax increase.
When asked to explain how the project escalated from $12.8 million to $17 million, Ryan offered a host of what he called unforeseen expenses, such as $980,000 to swap land with the Clarendon Hills Park District and build a new Park District multipurpose room, $500,000 for furniture, $530,000 to purchase additional property, $1 million for underground storm-water storage and $600,000 for increased labor costs due to construction delays.
But Davidson and Ken Nolan, president of the Park District, disagreed with Ryan’s math. They said some of the “unforeseen” expenses were already built into the $12.8 million or were problems the district should have known about beforehand.
Construction of Clarendon Hills Middle School, scheduled to open in the fall, has been plagued by controversy from the outset, including lengthy construction delays, a nasty battle with the Clarendon Hills Park District over a land swap and storm-water problems and a legal challenge from neighbors.
In 1997, District 181 officials announced their intention to build a new school to ease overcrowding at Hinsdale Middle School. At the time, district officials wanted to build the new school in Prospect Park. The school district owned land in the park and wanted to swap its site on the south end along Norfolk Avenue for a parcel on the north end along Chicago Avenue, which was owned by the Clarendon Hills Park District.
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Ryan said that when the district proposed the $12.8 million construction plan, it assumed it would do a one-for-one land swap with the Park District. In the end, however, the district had to spend an extra $980,000–which included construction of a $600,000 community center–to make the deal work, he said.
But Davidson and Nolan said the community center proposal was part of the initial discussion long before the referendum measure went to voters. Though the Park District and the school district had not yet agreed to any deal, the $12.8 million included–or should have included–some land-swap costs, they said.
Davidson added that some of the extra land-swap costs and the $500,000 the district spent to buy other property occurred because the school district did not have the title to all the land it thought it owned.
“We didn’t find out until after we were into the project,” Davidson said.
Ryan disputed that. “I’ve never heard that we didn’t own as much property as we thought we did. I believe we did,” he said.
Aside from the land-swap problems, the largest obstacle facing the district has been the storm-water issue, which District 181, the Park District and Clarendon Hills officials have bickered about for years. Last year, town officials stopped school construction, claiming District 181 officials violated their storm-water permit.
Before the referendum proposal went to voters, district officials knew they would have to deal with storm-water and flooding issues. It is not clear, however, exactly how much they budgeted for the item. Ryan said the district never expected to pay $1 million to build underground storage tanks.
But Davidson and Nolan said the storm-water issues were far more complicated and the school district did not have a workable plan from the start.
Davidson also has said the $500,000 in furniture was part of the original $12.8 million.
“The taxpayers were told all along that the $12.8 million was the bottom-line deal, from start to finish,” he said.
School board member Michael Woerner said there are many reasons the project is over budget and enough blame to go around.
“We all share in the blame to some extent,” said Woerner, who voted against the contracts on the new school because he wanted the district to hire an internal project manager–which it did last year. “When you’ve got something of this magnitude, there are a lot of people who need to step to the plate, whether it be architects, board members, administrators, etc. . . . It’s my hope that someday we find out exactly why and how this happened.”