News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Sisters voters gave the green light to build a new Sisters High School with 53-46 percent approval in the May 15 election.
Now the hard work begins.
Architects, school staff and school board members will soon start designing the school room by room. Actual construction probably won't start until June of 2002, and the doors will not open until around January 2004.
According to district architect Scott Steele, the project starts with interviews of staff and teachers to determine "what they need to teach in this building."
Architects conducted a similar process in crafting the $20.5 million proposal put before voters, just to determine the scale of the project.
"Now what we're doing is getting much more specific," Steele said.
The new high school will accommodate 700 students. Sisters Middle School will move into the current high school facility.
This "education specifications and programming phase" will last till about June 20, Steele said. This phase will form the basis of any further design work.
Through July and August, Steele and his design team will start developing schematics -- options for site and building layout, elevations --all in rough form.
Then the school board will start refining the design.
It will be up to the board to decide how public input on the design is handled, but Steele expects to hear from the citizens who are footing the bill.
"We'd love to entertain discussing the design," he said. "I think it would be a good idea. I'm totally open to it."
Actual design development will take place between September and December 2001.
At that stage, "we're tightening the whole design up and refining it," Steele said.
Blueprints and construction documents will be put together at the beginning of 2002 and "bidding should be done by the end of May, 2002," Steele said.
Bids are expected to come in from contractors all around the Pacific Northwest.
"This is a good sized project," Steele said. "I would expect that we'll have contractors from the Willamette Valley... I'm expecting to see contractors from Washington, Oregon and Idaho."
Once construction starts in June 2002, it's expected to take well over a year.
"It's going to take about 18 months to put a project of this size together," Steele said.
He noted that moving in all the equipment and furniture for the school will take some weeks all by itself.
"The doors could be opened, I would say, the new year of 2004," Steele said.
While the architects launch the project design, school superintendent Steve Swisher has been meeting with Charles Carter, a municipal bond consultant, preparing to sell the $20.5 million bond.
"We want to be well positioned for the best interest rates," said Swisher. "It's just like the mortgage on your house. The lower the interest rate, the quicker it can be paid off or the lower the rate will be."
Right now the district is looking at a composite rate of 5 to 5.3 percent.
The bond sale process is a complicated one, also requiring requests for proposal to banks interested in handling the funds. Swisher noted that the district is restricted by law from earning "too much" interest on the cash from the bond.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
Reader Comments(0)