The work on the 107-year-old building, which is located at 400 S. Greenville Ave., will add offices for district staff, create a flexible space for the board of trustees and renovate restrooms, Assistant Superintendent Sandra Hayes said during the meeting. The work will all be done on the second floor and primarily on the south end of the building, she said.
“When you work on a building of this age, you have to set a budget with anticipation of what you don't know you're going to find as you start construction,” Hayes said to the board. “Anything that was built prior to the '70s has asbestos. So anytime we do work now in our buildings, the construction project ... always [includes to] remove as much of the asbestos as we can so we can have a clean building.”
Hayes said the full budget for the project is $2.55 million.
The district will also be working with Oncor to get a new transformer brought in, as the building is currently at its limit for electricity, Hayes said.
“We can't add any more people or any more devices or plug in anything else until we can get additional power,” she said. “This building started out without electricity, and it was added after the fact, as was just about everything else that we see in the building.”
Staff that will be affected by the construction work have already been moved out of the administration building, Hayes said. The bulk of the work is slated to be completed before the end of September, she said.
The district plans to pay for the project with money from its local capital projects fund, Hayes said. Chief Financial Officer David Pate said, once the project is paid off, that fund will have approximately $8.3 million left in it.
Hayes said the last time a major renovation was done to the administration building, which houses the office of Superintendent Jeannie Stone and hosts the board of trustees meetings, was the late 1990s.
“We typically have to do something to this building about every four or five years, in some form,” Hayes said, noting it originally cost $16,000 to construct after the passage of a bond in 1913.
