Key Points:
- The BOS unanimously created a dedicated School Building Committee and authorized a search for an owner’s agent.
- Boucher continued to express concerns over who would oversee the projects and hold responsibility for reviewing and approving invoices.
- The selectmen deferred action on Boucher’s proposal for a parallel municipal building committee.
Why It Matters: The decisions will shape how Wilton oversees major school projects, assigns financial responsibility and protects eligibility for state reimbursement.
Despite several concerns voiced by First Selectman Toni Boucher, including “discomfort” expressed by at least one Town employee, the Board of Selectmen voted unanimously on Tuesday, Sept. 8, to create a School Building Committee and to authorize a search for an owner’s agent to oversee upcoming school construction projects.
The request originated last month with Board of Education Chair Ruth DeLuca, who asked for a single School Building Committee that would focus on the particular needs of school construction projects, along with the authorization to hire a dedicated consultant to manage that work.
While the four other selectmen appeared to fully support both requests, Boucher raised concerns shortly before the vote about who ultimately would be responsible for reviewing and approving invoices that were brought before the BOS.
Boucher said there was a “disconnect” between a consultant whom she didn’t see as having authority to approve invoices and Town employees — in particular, her Interim Director of the Department of Public Works Jeff Pardo, who until now has been both the on-site manager for major construction projects and the Town employee signing off on invoices.
“He would not be feeling comfortable signing off on an invoice on a project and work that he hadn’t seen or overseen,” Boucher said.
Boucher had raised the same question during a previous BOS discussion. At an Aug. 24 special meeting, both BOS and BOE members heard presentations from two different companies that provide owner’s agents for construction projects. Boucher asked each representative about responsibility for approving invoices.
On Tuesday, Boucher said that although the questions had been posed to the consultants, no definitive explanation had been provided about where final authority and fiduciary responsibility would rest.
DeLuca responded to Boucher’s concern, indicating that who signed an invoice could depend on the circumstances, rather than identifying one person who would always provide final authorization.
Selectman Matt Raimondi stepped in to explain the role as he understood it — a consultant who would take on responsibilities that Pardo previously handled for school construction projects.
“Jeff is incredibly overburdened right now,” Raimondi said, “and so the idea was that this owner’s agent is effectively a duplicate with Jeff. It doesn’t work for the town but it has a fiduciary obligation.”
DeLuca piggybacked on that explanation.
“The point of the owner’s agent was buying additional capacity that we don’t currently have in DPW,” DeLuca said, saying the owner’s agent would take over what had previously been Pardo’s role in the process.
The request for an owner’s agent, as well as the committee itself, is tied to concerns school officials have raised about how DPW has overseen school construction work in the past. In particular, they have questioned whether state reimbursements could be jeopardized if aspects of the construction projects currently underway are not completed according to the stringent specifications required by the State for reimbursement.
Boucher Seeks Municipal Building Committee
With the approval to form a School Building Committee, Boucher pushed for the BOS to also authorize a separate parallel Town Building Committee Tuesday night, that would focus its attention on municipal building projects.
“I also want to put on the table that we also, at the same time, put together a Municipal Building Committee as well,” Boucher said, “so that we have both happening, I think, because the other will need to get organized and be able to just decide [on] whatever resources we’ll put toward a possible view of what the needs are for the municipal buildings because they’re falling apart.”
Although the other four BOS members had expressed support for considering a Town Building Committee, they rejected Boucher’s eagerness to move forward quickly and vote to form one, turning down both her first request for a motion to form the committee that evening, and then Second Selectman Ross Tartell‘s suggestion for the BOS to create one before the end of the year. Boucher eventually succeeded in small part, getting the board to approve putting a discussion on the topic on the next meeting’s agenda.
Raimondi said that while the Wilton Capital Planning Committee and its earlier version, T-SNAP, had done good work, he didn’t want a new committee simply to become another version of its predecessor.
“There’s a risk of that because we don’t even know the buildings we’re working on yet,” he said, calling it more amorphous at this time.
“We should still do it [but] I think that we should just probably … discuss it more,” Raimondi said.
Before the board voted to create the new School Building Committee, Boucher also warned that her executive assistant already manages the paperwork and administrative work for approximately 15 other committees, including posting public documents.
“There used to be two people doing that job and now there’s just one, so it creates a lot of burden,” Boucher said.
Selectman David Tatkow said that should not determine whether the committee was created.
“I think we should make decisions based on what’s best for the town,” Tatkow said, adding that the board shouldn’t let “the tail wag the dog.”
The BOS will discuss the proposed Town Building Committee in more detail at its Sept. 21 regular meeting.
Meanwhile, the chief financial officers from both the BOE and the Town will jointly prepare a Request for Proposals (RFP) seeking an owner’s agent for the school construction projects.
