JD Malone of the Express-Times reports today (read the article here) that the NASD Buildings & Grounds Committee had a meeting that featured a capital projects review of the new Middle School. The discussion of the meeting focused on how environmentally friendly to make the new building and how extra it would cost to do so.
In the article it is not clear who wants the building to be environmentally friendly only that the board members questioned the cost of doing so and the Asst. Superintendent and Project Manager discussed points needed to be silver certified.
The Project Manager would not estimate a cost to be silver certified, but the Asst. Superintendent noted 3% or $1.5 million more.
What do you think? I find it interesting that the advocate for the extra costs appears to be absent despite the discussion. It appears the Board is not in favor of it (at least those two members quoted) due to the extra cost, which means it was built in by the architect or requested by administration. Either way this seems like a discussion that should have been made prior to plans being drawn up in the first place.
2 comments:
Depends on what they are looking to implement to make the building "environmentally friendly". One of the benefits of doing so is that even though there is a larger up front cost, the long term operations and maintenance costs go way down.
If that is the ultimate goal, then I would fully support spending the extra money now to save a lot more over the life of the building.
Clearly more information is needed on this one.
If they could demonstrate anticipated costs alongside annual savings and the cost to build with and without you'd have a good idea of the gain/loss on this one.
Like you, if we could save over time I'd take it, but the recent budget shows that not only are our costs increaseing, they seem to be doing so almost exponentially.
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