A fire in April damaged several classrooms at Waianae High School, including this one. The state Department of Accounting and General Services hopes to finish rebuilding the classrooms by next May.
Isle DOE ready
to don hard hatsSuperintendent Pat Hamamoto
will have more authority over
school construction
When a fire wrecked four classrooms at Waianae High School during spring break, students jammed into the library for the rest of the school year, and the state estimated it would take two years to restore the building.
Portable classrooms have not yet been installed on the Leeward campus, four months after the April 1 electrical fire tore through the second floor.
Such time lags are something that Rae Loui, assistant superintendent of schools, hopes to change as oversight of school repair and maintenance projects gradually shifts from the Department of Accounting and General Services to the Department of Education.
"If you're a bank, you couldn't tolerate not having your branch open for two years," she said. "We need to do better for our kids ... Shouldn't we have an open-ended contract with a company that provides portables so we'll be able to have them available right away?"
But such seemingly sensible solutions don't come easily, given state and federal regulations that govern bidding and construction projects, according to state Comptroller Russ K. Saito, who oversees the Department of Accounting and General Services.
"It sounds like a very easy thing to do, and conceptually it is," Saito said. "But there are a lot of details that need to be looked at."
In her speech to the Legislature last January, Schools Superintendent Pat Hamamoto asked legislators to hold her accountable and expect results, but first give her "the tools and space to do my job." Among her requests was to give her department full authority over its budget and personnel, as well as school repair and construction.
Hamamoto is about to find out what headaches are involved in fixing up Hawaii's 258 traditional public schools.
The first, small step in the hand-off took place Thursday when DAGS shifted responsibility for $100 million in bond funds and $6.5 million in cash for repair and maintenance projects for this school year to Department of Education. While DAGS workers will continue to do most of the work, the change means the public school system will be calling the shots on those projects, rather than simply handing over a wish list.
"They will prioritize all of the work, and there are reporting requirements, so that DAGS is held accountable for doing the projects that they've assigned to us in the manner they would like to have them done," Saito said.
The Education Department also will handle $5 million worth of the projects by itself, smaller ones worth $25,000 to $100,000, and may take on more as the year goes by.
"They are the ones we felt would have the most impact," Loui said. "My intent is to get those out as quickly as we can. Those are the small, niggling projects that might have been around for a while -- things like replacing toilets. The transfer didn't include any manpower, so we need to make sure it's manageable."
Getting projects like Waianae's Building U back in action -- which entails replacing the roof as well as rebuilding the classrooms -- was initially expected to take two years. That's the standard interval for such complex projects, Saito said.
But at the urging of the Department of Education, his agency has whittled that time frame down to close to a year, and hopes to have the job done next May, he said. A design consultant was chosen in May and his design is due in September, when the project will go out to bid, with bids opened in December and construction to start shortly thereafter. The portable classrooms, which had to come from the mainland, have arrived and will be installed this summer.
"We're moving as fast as we can," Saito said. "This is an aggressive schedule."
The reasons such projects can take so long are twofold, he said. First, the procurement process requires fair and open access to government work. Second, major renovations require design work, bringing buildings up to code and meeting federal regulations, such as access for the disabled.
"The fire at Waianae apparently started with an electrical short circuit," Saito noted. "Do we just go back in there and run the same wires, or do we look at whether the wiring was adequate to handle the load?
"Even though people say, 'The building's there, what do you need to design?' you need to look at the adequacy of the wiring, the adequacy of the communication lines -- because they may be putting computers into those classrooms -- you have to be sure that building is in compliance with regulations," he said.
"Whenever you do major construction, you need to make progress toward compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act," he added. "Do we need to go in and widen doors, do we need to fix the bathroom so we can run a wheelchair in there?"
In all, the school system faces a $440 million backlog in repair and maintenance projects, Saito said. And every year, another $50 million worth crop up as buildings deteriorate. Over the last fiscal year, the Legislature appropriated just $35 million for public school repair. This year, at the governor's urging, the figure is up to $100 million. The Waianae fire is covered by insurance, and will not affect the R&M budget.
Loui, who handled all the city's capital projects before joining the Department of Education in February 2003, wants to try alternatives to the traditional, years-long "plan, design, bid, build" mentality. The timeframe can be compressed through new methods of project delivery, she said, such as "design-build" in which contractors and designers team up to bid on projects.
Another system, known as "indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity," or IDIQ, allows contracting with several electrical firms, and issuing work orders to them as small jobs come up.
"We're looking at this as a chance to completely change things and put more of a private industry attitude to do things faster and maybe better," she said.
Over the next year, the two agencies will be hammering out how to transfer complete control of repair and maintenance to the Department of Education by figuring out how to deal with resources such as DAGS personnel and base yards, which serve several state agencies.
"That's the $64,000 question," Saito said. "It's going to be very, very intense, because there are a lot of activities that need to be considered."
But both he and Loui praised what they called a new spirit of cooperation between the two departments.
"In state government, there's always interdepartmental rivalry, everybody protecting their own sandbox," Saito said. "But in this case, from my perspective what is driving everything is we want to provide the best service we can to the schools regardless of who provides it."
State Department of Education
doe.k12.hi.us
