Gloucester’s new estimated $6.4 million transportation facility could be completed and ready for occupancy by January 2020, according to a design and construction timeline approved by the Gloucester County Board of Supervisors Tuesday night.
Completion of the facility on the new Page Middle School site would free up the former school site for potential economic development and other county needs and would help better serve both school and county transportation maintenance needs, according to Gloucester County administrator Brent Fedors.
With the timeline presented during a joint meeting of the county’s board of supervisors and school board Tuesday night in the T.C. Walker Education Center, the county can now advertise for requests for proposals for architectural and engineering services. Once proposals are received in October, both boards can agree on a proposal and execute a contract for design services as early as November, according to Fedors.
Fedors said the design phase is expected to take about nine months, while construction is expected to take 15 more. When asked by at-large board of supervisor member John Meyer Jr. why it looked like it would take so long, Fedors said, “If any of those phases can be completed sooner, the timeline will be compressed. We’re not going to wait any longer than we have to.”
One point of contention among several supervisors and school board members was the potential of losing the baseball field at the old school site once the transportation facility is completed and the property is then transferred from the school system to the county. With the current transportation facility and the baseball field on the site, it chops the property up too much to be of economic development value, Fedors said.
York district supervisor Phillip Bazzani asked why the construction of a new baseball field on the new school site was listed at number five on the schools’ capital priorities list and wanted to see its construction run parallel with the construction of the transportation facility. Both Fedors and school superintendent Walter Clemons explained that any project in the top five of the capital improvements list is of high priority, and it is difficult to rank those five ahead of one another.
“I don’t want us to see a nickel hold up the dollar on this,” added at-large school board member Jarret Lee. “As long as the students always have a ballfield somewhere, I’m fine … I just don’t want to see us turn the property over (to the county) and have no ballfield.”
“This is the perfect opportunity for the school board to actually trust the board of supervisors in what we are looking to do here,” Gloucester Point district supervisor Chris Hutson said.
“We’ve been talking about this facility since 2012-2013,” said Abingdon district supervisor Robert “J.J.” Orth. “It’s great to be moving forward on it.”
In March, Gloucester’s deputy county administrator Garrey Curry presented both boards some figures showing the potential return on investment if the old Page site were left for economic development purposes. He said potential revenue to the county from the old Page site from a direct sale could be about $667,000. Also, he said the land tax could generate about $4,635 a year and if a building were placed on the property by an outside entity at an estimated cost of $10 million, this would provide close to $70,000 per year in revenue.
Finally, if a prospective business had machinery and tools valued at $10 million, the tax on those items would generate about $88,500 per year. “Basically, the total potential revenue the county could see for this property would be $162,635 per year,” Curry said.
GHS Master Plan
In other news, both boards received an update on the Gloucester High School Master Plan Study. Architects and structural engineers have been surveying the high school in recent months looking at roofing, parking and other infrastructure needs, much of which they said are in immediate need of replacement or repair.
The next steps will be to develop conceptual master plan ideas, cost estimates and models to provide the governing bodies with a variety of options on how to move forward. The conceptual master plan will be presented to both boards in the coming months.
“I’ve been sitting here listening and wondering where in the world are we going to get money enough to do everything we are talking about tonight,” said Ware district supervisor Andy James. “We’re being presented with a myriad of things and we’ve not even gotten to budget time.”
James said he is all for building a new baseball field for students to play on as sports played a major positive role in his life growing up. However, he questioned the estimated $500,000 price tag for the new field. “I thought you guys must have talked to the same people that built Yankee Stadium,” he chuckled.