BOE Chair DeLuca Brings School Building Project Oversight Directly to BOS

Prompted by a focused push for action by the Board of Education, the Board of Selectmen on Monday night, Aug. 17, considered the idea of hiring an owner’s agent (or representative) to oversee upcoming school building renovation projects.

Although most selectmen appeared receptive, including two who were prepared to approve drafting a request for proposals (RFP) that night, First Selectman Toni Boucher and Chief Financial Officer Dawn Savo questioned how an outside representative’s authority and accountability would be structured.

The BOS also discussed the BOE’s request to create a dedicated school building committee, but appeared more inclined to explore hiring an owner’s agent first.

Boucher said she would invite several industry professionals in to a special BOS meeting within the next week or two to explain what the role would entail. The BOS took no vote Monday on either issuing a request for proposals or creating a building committee.

BOE Prompts Action

After receiving unanimous support from her board earlier in the day, BOE Chair Ruth DeLuca spoke during the first public comment section of Monday’s BOS meeting to make her case.

She emphasized that mistakes made in the management of school building projects could jeopardize state reimbursements. She also said that while she had tried to move the proposals for a new committee and owner’s agent forward, Boucher had not brought them to the BOS for consideration at its previous meeting. DeLuca said she came to Monday’s meeting to present the request herself.

“We are proposing that the Board of Selectmen create a dedicated school’s building committee and put a dedicated owner’s agent in place so that Wilton’s school infrastructure projects are done right, on budget, on time, and with the state paying its full share,” DeLuca told the BOS.

DeLuca argued that school construction requires specialized oversight because educational specifications developed by the BOE guide both a project’s physical design and its eligibility for state reimbursement.

“No educational specifications, no eligible grant application, no dollars back for Wilton taxpayers,” she said.

A single school building committee overseeing projects at Cider Mill School, Middlebrook School and Wilton High School would allow the town to apply lessons from one project to the next, DeLuca said, rather than developing separate approaches to procurement, budgeting and state grants for each building.

She said the proposal was modeled on the committee that oversaw the Miller-Driscoll School renovation project and would give each school’s principal and parent representatives an advisory role.

“None of this is a case against a facilities committee for our municipal buildings — that may well be worth pursuing in its own right,” DeLuca said. “It is a case for keeping our schools’ committee its own: focused, accountable and answerable specifically for our children’s classrooms and for the reimbursement dollars that depend on getting this right.”

Questions About Authority and Accountability

While the other four BOS members were amenable to hiring an owner’s representative — with two prepared to approve drafting an RFP Monday night — Boucher and Savo pushed back on the idea, raising concerns about how the person’s authority and accountability would be structured.

DeLuca had said in her statement that an owner’s representative would serve a different function from architects, construction managers and contractors working on the projects.

“Their only job — their fiduciary duty — is to us, the town,” DeLuca said, describing a representative focused on managing the budget and schedule, pursuing state reimbursement and protecting the town’s investment.

She also said hiring an owner’s representative could help address a management capacity gap at a time when the town is without a permanent director of public works and town administrator and both school and municipal facilities require significant attention.

Boucher and Savo argued that if the owner’s agent were hired as a vendor, they should not be granted any independent authority to approve financial expenditures. As a result, they said, Department of Public Works staff would be responsible for approving invoices, and still need to oversee the representative and the project — something Savo said was confirmed by both Interim DPW Director Jeff Pardo and former Director Frank Smeriglio.

“So if there are issues that come up, they still need to know what’s going on,” Savo said. “I think that’s the issue.”

Without specifying a department or mentioning names, Boucher said certain town employees would be concerned about an owner’s agent, and being held accountable for work they did not directly oversee.

“What I’m hearing internally is that if they have to sign something, they have to be more involved,” Boucher said.

“They don’t want to be responsible for signing an invoice on it internally if they don’t have the oversight over the vendor … No, the internal staff has to be responsible. Their job is responsibility for those buildings,” she said.

Selectmen’s Different POV: Advocating for and Supporting Staff

The four other BOS members were not convinced that the division of responsibility presented an insurmountable issue. They noted matter of factly that the town could structure an agreement with a vendor or new employee in any way it wanted to define responsibilities and grant some an appropriate level of fiduciary oversight.

Selectman Matt Raimondi said that hiring someone to fill the role would be a way to advocate for the DPW and town staff.

“We’re advocating for internal staff by saying, ‘We recognize the workload that you’re under,'” Raimondi said. “‘We’re trying to get you more resources and here’s a direct way for us to do that.'”

He noted that major building project decisions and contract approvals would ultimately remain subject to BOS approval.

Selectman Rich McCarty also spoke in favor of hiring an owner’s agent.

“We can structure it as we see fit … defining the roles and responsibilities in consultation with the DPW,” McCarty said, “so that we all get comfortable with what he or she can sign off on, and what he or she can sign off on before it comes to us.”

Like Raimondi, Selectman David Tatkow said he would have been willing to move forward with the RFP immediately.

“There’s different levels of discretion,” Tatkow said. “I mean, fiduciary responsibility, but you can contractually specify what they can and can’t do on their own [and] what must be brought before the town.”

Recommendations

Boucher wrapped up the conversation by proposing she would contact some professional owner’s agents and invite them in to speak with the BOS about the owner’s representative model. She named Turner Construction, one construction company the town has worked with, as one possible contact.

“I will quickly, tomorrow, try to pull together some folks that can come and talk to us in the next week or two about the ownership model,” Boucher said.

Asked by Tatkow if it would make sense to involve the BOE in setting up the meeting, Boucher said that a BOE representative could be invited to attend.

Sitting in the seats for public attendees, DeLuca could be seen visibly shaking her head in reaction.

Selectman Ross Tartell restated Tatkow’s question.

“They may have a recommendation,” he told Boucher, who then relented, saying that the BOE could send her office some vendor suggestions.

Speaking during public comment, resident Patti Frisch, a real estate and land-use attorney who also serves on the Zoning Board of Appeals, pointed out that an owner’s representative serves a very different role from a construction manager.

“I would encourage you to bring people to the meeting who are not construction managers, not Turner Construction or somebody like them,” Frisch said, “but somebody who is in the business of being an owner’s rep, and that’s a very different thing.”

Frisch said DeLuca might already have recommendations and encouraged Boucher and the BOS to involve her.

“I think that it’s important to look outside the box in terms of who you are thinking of bringing in,” Frisch said, “and not just the people that you’ve dealt with in the past.”

During the second public comment section at the end of the meeting, DeLuca urged the selectmen to use the BOE as a resource, noting that school officials had already spoken with potential providers and developed a draft RFP.

“I do think you should consider the RFP process as also an educative tool, because it is a way to find out what different firms can offer when you then list all the different services that you’re looking for,” DeLuca said. “We have talked to people in the past. We have an RFP that’s already been generated to that effect.”

DeLuca again noted that her proposed building committee was modeled on the Miller-Driscoll Building Committee and said Wilton should examine other towns’ practices without discounting its own experience.

“While a lot of different towns do things in different ways, I think we also shouldn’t discount the success and the pathways that this town has had,” she said. “I hope that you will continue to use the BOE as a resource.”

Building Committee or Committees?

The BOS spent several minutes discussing building committees but reached a consensus to revisit the topic at its next meeting.

For the first time publicly, Boucher referenced “sunsetting” the two-year-old Wilton Capital Planning Committee (WCPC), formerly the Town and School Needs Assessment Priorities Committee (TSNAP).

That group was originally charged with helping guide the town’s approach to nearly $150 million needed in building repairs and renovations for several town-owned buildings. Despite including a Who’s Who of town officials and employees, the committee struggled to establish a clear focus and define the scope of its charge.

While Boucher had expressed hope months ago that the WCPC might expand its mission to handle more building-related responsibilities, at the Aug. 3 BOS meeting she raised the idea for the first time of creating a new and separate permanent town building committee.

That discussion was focused primarily on renovating or reconstructing Town Hall and the Town Hall Annex. Boucher’s failure to include school building needs in that discussion prompted DeLuca to express concern on behalf of the BOE Monday evening.

“I’m not asking for a vote tonight,” DeLuca told the BOS. She was joined at the meeting by fellow BOE members Pamela Ely and Lori Bufano, along with Superintendent Kevin Smith. “This is simply what the Board of Education believes is the best policy and the right approach.”

During Monday’s discussion, several BOS members referenced the distinct needs of school buildings compared with municipal buildings. They suggested a separate committee might be better equipped to focus on educational specifications and the construction process required for state reimbursement eligibility.

Boucher said she had already been in communication with former members of a previous building committee and indicated it might be beneficial to involve them again. She said she did not believe the town should create two separate building committees but suggested that one committee could have two subcommittees, one of which would focus on the schools.

In her remarks to the BOS, DeLuca emphasized that she was not seeking an immediate decision but warned that both a building committee and owner’s representative would need to be established well in advance if the town expects work authorized through bonding to begin next summer without unnecessary escalation costs.

“The building committee and the owner’s agent will need to be in place well before then,” she said, “so the projects have the runway they need.”