 This is a public outreach meeting for the Fort River School Building Committee. And we're primarily going to hear tonight from our designers to kind of walk everyone through where they are. But I have some beginning remarks. I'll introduce myself. I'm Jonathan Salvin. I'm the chair of the committee. And there's about seven of us here. I won't torture them all by making them stand up and identify themselves. We do have some note cards at the back. If folks want to make notes for questions as the presentations are going along, or if folks would rather write a question on a note card as opposed to coming up to one of the microphones later. And I think those were owed. We do have some handouts. We don't have enough for everyone. But if folks have trouble seeing the screen, it will have a lot. Well, it'll have exactly the same thing as our designers' presentation. And with that, I'm going to start with my introductory slides. And then we'll move on to our designers from TSKP. The Fort River, I need to see the screen and talk at the same time. So I'm going to rotate this a little bit. The Fort River School Building Committee is a committee that was authorized by town meeting in March of 2017. We've been meeting as a committee since October of 2017. Our committee is a feasibility study focused committee that is looking that will sunset when that feasibility study is complete. And we report to the school committee. We are focused on the Fort River site and building. The configuration we're looking at is pre-K through 6. And we're charged with considering and developing to the appropriate level for a feasibility study multiple options on that site, including new construction and various addition and renovations. This feasibility study is not being conducted as part of an MSBA process. Nonetheless, we use the MSBA process as sort of a framework for how we would look at our work to ensure that we explored comparable levels of information. Could we go to the next slide? Oops, I hit the clicker. I apologize. Hope there it is. What's happened to date? Before bringing on TSKP, we did some air quality testing. We have had some ongoing site survey worked on which has just gotten completed about a week ago. Also within the last month or so, we've completed geotechnical borings. And we have hired a design team led by TSKP studios that also includes civil engineers, structural engineers, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire protection engineers, and a green building net zero energy consultants. And the design team's work to date is sort of comparable to, again, since we're modeling the MSBA process and is comparable to that, that would be at the very beginning stage of a MSBA feasibility process. So the design team has come out. They've done some site visits. They've done a draft report of the existing building and site conditions. They've met with school department staff and developed a working draft for an educational program. And they've developed a range of options, which you will see later this evening. And then most recently, we've been working with them and reviewing draft cost estimates. I think that's the end of my part here. I'm going to introduce Richard Sipic from TSKP Studios, who will walk us through the next stage. Thanks very much, Jonathan. Good evening, everyone. My name is Richard Sipic. I'm a partner with a firm known as TSKP Studio. I'm a registered architect in Massachusetts and in Connecticut. Our firm has done projects in the region. And we have an office in Boston as well as in Hartford. This is an interim presentation. We have still some work to do to finish our study. In fact, when we're finished, there will be a very thick binder divided into sections. You heard the committee chair, Jonathan, say that we are following the model that MSBA uses when it asks for a feasibility study. So we've been using those sections in our report that are similar to the sections that you would expect MSBA to do. Now, my firm doesn't work alone in these kinds of feasibility studies. We have a whole range of very experienced consultants and experts, including limb consultants. They are structural engineers. They examine the existing building. Kessler McGinnis and Associates, they are our accessibility consultants. They did a report for us. They did a complete assessment of the site and the building as far as accessibility is concerned. Coal Aronan engineers, they are an experienced mechanical electrical plumbing engineers. And they've done net zero buildings. And then we also have Chris Schaffner, who's also known as the green engineer out of Concord. They are our sustainable consultant. Berkshire Design Group, which does site and civil engineering, has consulted with us. And then we have an independent cost estimator, which is the way we like to do cost estimates. Someone working in parallel with us, this is not our estimate. It's our professional independent estimator, AM Fogarty. In addition to that, the town has retained the services of a surveyor, which we did receive a survey recently, as well as a geotechnical engineer called O'Reilly, Talbot, and Oaken. And we've worked with them in the past. So there were a lot of questions that were raised during the course of our work thus far. And I expect that there will be some other questions that we raised at tonight's meeting. And this presentation will be posted for the public to view at its leisure. And I expect that there will be questions posted by members of the public after seeing this recorded presentation. But in my mind, this feasibility study addresses two major questions, the first of which is, is the Fort River School Site buildable? And the second is, if so, what are the options on this site? Does it make sense to renovate the existing building, add on to it, or completely replace it? I'm going to answer the first question, yes, but then we'll get into the details later. Yes, the site is buildable. We've had geotechnical work done. We've done a preliminary review of that work. And I will share that a little bit later. What are the options for building, a building, or renovating the existing building? There's a wide range of options. And so I'm going to try to give you an overview of those options. So just as a reminder, the Fort River School was a one-story building built in the 70s, the early 70s. It was built at a time when open classrooms were the thing to do. It's no longer the thing to do. And one of the problems with the existing building is that has open classrooms that have been modified as best as could be in order to make them usable by the educators. The building is situated here in this, north is to the left, by the way, so the building is sort of situated here in the northwestern corner of this site. There is parking in front. There's play areas at each end. There's play fields out back, and playscapes, playground structures. The building has also these holes in it, as you can see. These are light wells, very small courtyards, in order to get daylight internally. It's a fairly level site, and we've done an investigation of the site and the building. And as far as the building is concerned, I guess some of the defects in the building or some of the areas that need to be addressed can be categorized into three categories. First, deferred capital infrastructure replacement items. Second is unsatisfied educational needs. And the third is security. So the plan of the existing building, as you can see, is a symmetrical plan with administration located here with classrooms on both sides. In the center is the media center. At the far end is the gymnasium. And then at the opposite end of the building is the cafeteria and kitchen. But each of these blocks that you see is actually designed for four classrooms. So these four classrooms have these movable partitions separating one space to the next. And some of them have a view of this very small courtyard. Those little rectangles with the squares represent. The media center is windowless. There are no views. As you can see, it's a fairly dark space. Now one of the things that I observed when I first came to the building is how far it is from the front door, which is located here, to the administration area. And in fact, the door is typically kept open here so that someone could monitor people coming in the front door. That's not how you would plan a school today. You would have a very secure vestibule that you keep locked internally and then someone would need to check in before they're allowed into the building. Another difficulty is having the open spaces, such as the community spaces, such as the cafeteria, media center, or gymnasium. Typically those spaces would be available after hours and there should be a way to get into them without entering the building itself. The building is approximately 78,000 square feet. And from my assessment, it's not adequate in size either. Some of the classrooms are, sorry. Some of the classrooms are quite small, as small as 677 square feet, 734 square feet. Remember, we're using the MSBA guidelines as a model. We had quite a bit of discussion very early on with the building committee. What should be used as a guideline for a square footage? That was one of the first questions we asked and the consensus was, well, let's use what the state guidelines are. What the state says is that you should have classrooms of about 900 square feet. So that puts that in perspective. 677 to 734 square feet for a classroom is inadequate. Overall, if you look at the MSBA guidelines, you should have 72,000 square feet for the population. But on top of that, we have some district-wide features in the school that need to be addressed, such as the special ed rooms, such as the possibility for a pre-K program being added so that we added that square footage, as well as there's a Amherst population guideline per classroom. That's the Amherst public schools requirement. So we believe that if we adjust the MSBA guidelines to accommodate those district-wide needs, you would probably be in the 85,000 square foot range for the building. We did meet with staff. We did meet with school administration. We did a complete analysis of the kinds of spaces that you would expect for a school of this size. And I know you can't read this, but this document is available, it is posted. And what it is is a list of all of the spaces that we would require to be inserted in the building to fulfill the educational needs. Spaces such as special ed rooms, phys ed spaces, art and music, and so on. Incidentally, I do wanna point out that the MSBA guidelines say that your gymnasium should be 6,000 square feet. You don't have 6,000 square feet in the existing building. You have, I believe, about 4,000 square feet. Let's talk a little bit about sustainability and net zero. You know that one of the bylaws of the town is that when it comes to new construction, you need to build a building that is a net zero energy building. As far as the MSBA is concerned, we do need to meet lead requirements. We know that that's something that has to be done. And we know that by code, we need to build a building that's at least 10% more efficient than current building standards. In fact, what MSBA says is if you are interested in building a building that is even more efficient, if you reduce the energy by at least 20% better than the building code, they will add additional reimbursement. That's another subject, whether or not this is an MSBA project, but we wanted to give you some benchmarks to compare. All of the options I'm going to present to you meet that 20% additional energy savings, except for three of the six that I will show you. Let's talk a little bit about net zero. I suspect that many of you are familiar with what net zero means and what the requirements are, but perhaps some of you don't. Back in 2008, we would expect that a code compliant building in Massachusetts or in New England would have to achieve something called energy use intensity. And that is measured in a certain way. That unit is KBTU per square foot per year. I'm not gonna get into all the details, but it's a measure that people who measure energy use as a unit of measure to see how efficient your building is. We know that over time, those demands have been dropping and we need to meet a building that achieves a much greater goal in terms of energy efficiency. The bylaw that exists in Amherst for net zero says, well, you need to be able to generate electricity or create a very energy efficient building or a combination of that in order to have, so that you don't need to purchase energy outside the site. So over time, again, we see energy being generated on sites, on building projects, so that in addition to dropping the energy consumption of the building itself, we are generating electricity in projects in order to then get to a net zero energy purchase. That's achievable. It's been getting more and more achievable. What does that mean in practical terms? One of the options I'm gonna show you is a new building option. A new building option, if we were to build a building just south of the existing building, the existing building is shown in a dotted line here. That's the outline of it. If we were to replace that building with a two-story new building just south of that footprint, we would need to, for example, generate electricity through perhaps photovoltaic panels on the roof or on the site. Other possibilities are wind generators or other innovative ways. But the most practical way because the wind profiles in this region are not that great is photovoltaics. In order to generate enough electricity for a building of this size on this site, we would need to create, we need to have this many photovoltaic panels, not only on the roof, but also over the parking areas and also on the site. The cost of that, we're estimating, would be about 6.4 million for those photovoltaic panels and the infrastructure necessary for this building. That's for a certain energy use intensity measured as EUI 50. Let me go to this slide for a minute and then I'll go back. What does the building of EUI 50 feel like? It has, you can still have your summer programs all summer long in your school because remember, if you're running a program during the summer, it's using energy. EUI 50 allows that. You would have double glazed windows with low e-coding. You would have our 25 walls, our 30 roof. That's just a measure of insulation. And you would have a certain mechanical system with energy recovery, a system that would gather energy rather than completely exhaust it. Let's say you have a ventilation system that exhausts air and brings in fresh air, you do it be a way to capture that heat before it escapes the building. That's actually pretty conventional. That's a pretty conventional building. If you were to increase the energy efficiency of the building by adding some additional features, let's say for example, your target was EUI 30, you would then have to reduce your activity in the school so that you would only have a summer program in part of the building. You would have to be a little bit more relaxed about your temperature ranges in the building so that in the summer, you have to tolerate a temperature of 77 to 78 degrees in the wintertime, 68 degrees. Again, to reduce the energy consumption in the building. We would have to go to triple glazing. We would have to increase the insulation in the walls and in the roof. And also make sure that there's insulation under the slab. And we would probably supplement energy by introducing geothermal or air source heat pumps, either geothermal wells or a different kind of heat pump. And we would probably also have radiant flooring on the ground floor to temper the air so that occupants feel warmer quicker. If you can get radiant floor heating, then you can reduce the ambient air temperature in the room and people are still comfortable. It's just a more efficient way to deliver heat. So let's go back to the alternative scenario. So if we were to achieve those kinds of features in the building, that target of EUI 30, then we could reduce the number of photovoltaic panels but we would have to increase mechanical equipment in the building and the cost of that would be 7.6 million. So the differential is a little over a million dollars. That's the different, that's the premium cost. We can come back to this later if you have questions about it. One of the discussions we had with the building committee was what were the goals of the building project? And so we came up with this list of non-negotiable items. We wanted to make sure that in all options that we looked at we ended up with natural light in all the classrooms, good air quality and ventilation, good acoustics and so on. We had to comply with the town's net zero bylaw, sustainable design and so on, making sure that the building is fully accessible and that we met building energy code compliance. Those were non-negotiable items in every option that we looked at. I'm gonna briefly discuss six options. Actually there were, I don't know, over 127 options that we looked at but I'm just gonna focus on these six which shows you a range of possibilities. On the left hand side is option A which is 100% new building. Let's say that two-story footprint that I showed you earlier, that would be option A. Option B would be a two-story addition placed just south of the existing footprint. We would keep a lot of the existing. That would be a two-story addition. It would be 50% new and 50% renovation. That's why that's noted here. Option C we would reduce that to a one-story addition and renovate the remainder making that a 29% new building and as you can see we keep reducing the new construction until we get to zero. Option F. Option F is no new construction. It's strictly renovation of the existing building. Okay, let's look at this a little further. Option F we included, it doesn't really meet the educational goals. It doesn't meet the standards that we're trying to achieve nor does it meet the MSBA guidelines. In fact, we only included it for comparison purposes. What if we just renovated the building, brought it up to code? What would that cost? So we had to have some basis for comparison. So the option F would include abatement, roof replacement, window replacement. Everything you see here on the list but it would not be a new building and it would not achieve all of the educational goals. But it has a cost. This is deferred capital improvements that is still required for the building. Let's go through the options very quickly. Option A, as I said, would be building a new two-story building south of the existing building that would be done at a safe distance away from the existing one-story building and all of these spaces internally here, we studied to make sure that we were addressing all of those space needs that I showed you very briefly in that document earlier. Option B, very quickly, this is a two-story addition to the existing building. We would tear out out of the center of the building existing construction to create a courtyard so that we could get daylight internally. In plan form, then you'd see we're demolishing a portion of the building. We're building a new building and we're demolishing a portion of the building here that's shown in orange. So orange is demolition, blue is new, gray is renovated areas. Option C, here in this proposal, we would be building south of the existing building. Again, we were demolishing the core to get daylight internally. And as you can see, by the way, these rooms are configured now. Every room has an outside window. Remember, that was one of the non-negotiables. Every room had to have an outside window with operable windows in order to get ventilation as well as daylight, each in every classroom. Again, blue is new, orange is demolition. Option D is two additions, very small additions, and renovation of the existing building. As you can see here, the magnitude of new is quite small. In this scenario, we would be enclosing and capturing those outdoor courtyards, those very tiny courtyards, making them part of the square footage of the building. And again, tearing out the core of the building in order to create rooms that had daylight. Option E is a very small addition, primarily to serve a pre-K program, should it be added to the school. And in plan form, you can see how little blue area there is. Before I get into cost comparisons, I do want to explain some of the things that affect cost, such as duration of construction. So you saw a whole range of possibility, building new and building various amounts of addition and renovation work. New construction would be the quickest. You wouldn't affect anybody in the building while you're building the new building. You finish the new building, you move everybody in in one shot. It's the quickest way to do a project such as this. And as you can see, the longest duration is building a small addition. And in that scenario, we actually don't have enough swing space in the footprint of the building. We would have to create some temporary swing space outside the building, not classrooms, ideally other kinds of spaces, office, administration areas or whatever, to get enough square footage free in the building in order to then hop scotch around the building as we renovated it. It can be done, it's done very often. It just takes longer. And so you end up spending a lot more money for general conditions and superintendents time just because it just takes that much longer. Okay. I know it's difficult to read this chart, but if you have time, when you see this online, download it and take a look. This represents all of the range of options that we looked at. Option A, remember, is entirely new. B is two-story. C is one-story. Multiple small additions is D. Small addition is E. And we were asked to look at different population scenarios. The maximum population we looked at is 465 pupils, including pre-KK. So you'll see under each scenario, a column that includes a population of 465 pupils. In this option A, option B, option C, and so on. And then we looked at a number of mechanical systems. I'm not gonna get into all the details on the mechanical systems. We chose one of the mechanical system options when we analyzed the costs in the end. But you can see that the mechanical systems do affect the cost. Some of them cost more upfront. And they're simpler to maintain. Some of them cost less upfront, but they're more complicated to maintain. I'm gonna focus on just six numbers, not this 127. Just the six numbers I wanna look at are here, which we chose a mechanical system that was optimal for each scenario. And we chose the maximum population of 465. So if you look at this number, and we look at this number, that number, that one, that one, it's a sample from each possible scenario. Other footnote, this project cost includes the CM method of construction. You can build a building in two different ways. You can hire a construction manager called the CM method, or you can hire a general contractor, pretty straight general contractor, low bid kind of scenario. And there's a pros and cons to both. Generally, I will tell you that if you're going to be adding on and renovating an occupied building, you're better off going with a CM method of construction because there's a lot of phases that needs to occur. You have to make sure that you're keeping each area that you're renovating discreetly separated having construction crews going in and out separate from the school population. That just takes a great deal more management. And there's a cost associated with that. The simplest method is a general contractor method. You bid it out once, you hire a general contractor, and you build the building, new building in one big swoop, and then you move everyone in. These numbers all represent the CM method because we wanted to compare them all in an equal way. So here's how the costs compare. For a new building, option A, 63.3 million. Now, I'm talking about total project costs. Sometimes you hear numbers quoted for how much a building costs, and they'll only tell you the building cost, construction cost, or they'll exclude site costs, or they'll exclude furniture and equipment, or they'll exclude contingency, so you're not having a good comparison from one project to another. I'm telling you, we included everything. So this includes construction costs, includes CM fees, it includes owner's contingencies, furniture and equipment, includes demolition of the existing building, everything. That's a total gross project costs. So option A, 63.3 million, all the way down to option F, 28.3 million. So even if you just wanted to fix up the building and not address any of the educational deficiencies, this is what it would cost you, 28.3 million, using the CM method of construction, which is the only way to do it, in my opinion. This chart just basically is a reminder that we can reduce option A to 57 million if you go to a GC method, which is doable for a brand new building. Okay, I did say that this is an interim report. We still have work to do, and these are some of the things that we need to look at in some of the steps that we still have to take. We wanna discuss further with the committee, energy use intensity, does 50 make sense, or for a marginal increase, does 30 EUI make sense? Utility costs, we haven't had the opportunity to compare what you're currently spending on utilities versus what you could be spending on utilities for a new building or a renovated building. That needs to be done. We wanna look more closely at the zero energy bylaw. In particular, there's a rule in the bylaws that talks about, there's a 10% threshold. So if you are spending a certain amount of money that is 10% or more than 10% for those features in the building to get you to net zero, then you can go up to 10% and you can get renewable energy from another source. It doesn't have to be entirely generated on the site. At least that's my understanding of the net zero bylaw. It's a complicated rule. I just wanna make sure that we're right, and so this is something that we still need to address in our work going forward. And then another question that has been raised by members of the public is, what about carbon emissions? What's the carbon footprint of the building? And we still need to finish that evaluation. I will tell you that their carbon is measured in three different ways. One, if you're burning fossil fuels, you're releasing carbons into the atmosphere. So that's the first scope. We don't envision that happening if you go to a net zero building. Nevertheless, we need to add that to what is the carbon that's emitted in the production of any electricity that you're buying. And the third is, how much carbon was emitted in energy consumption in fabrication of building materials? Notoriously steel takes a lot of energy to fabricate. So embedded in steel, and in particular aluminum, is embedded a lot of energy consumption and consequently carbon emissions in the fabrication of those materials. So we still need to do that kind of analysis. So in conclusion, the site is buildable. Let me just tell you a little bit more about the site. We did receive a geotechnical report that in which geotechnical engineers and did borings on the site. Historically, the site was probably farmland at some point. The site has clay on it, and it does have water and the water varies in depth, depending upon where you look on the site. When we first saw the site, even before we did geotechnical analysis, we knew that this was in a riverbed area, which didn't frighten me. We've built in riverbed areas in the past. And at that time, I said, we might have to build on caissons, especially if it's a two-story building. I wasn't sure at that time. We know that the existing building is built on conventional spread footings, which is the least expensive, very conventional way to build a building. If it's a one-story building, odds are, that's all you'll need, again. But if it's a higher building, a higher load, you might need piles, for example. And so when we consulted with our cost estimator, we said, imagine the worst-case scenario, imagine that it's piles. The geotechnical report that we just received recently indicates that piles will not be necessary, that in fact, if you prepare the soil, and that could be just a matter of placing stones on the soil and then the foundations on those stones that you could certainly build with conventional footings. And what are the options? I showed you over 120 options, and then just focused on a sample of six. At this point, this is where we are. Jonathan, I'm not sure if you wanna handle the Q&A session, but we'd be happy to answer any questions. If you could bring in that other slicer, just a second, I've got a couple sort of tail-in slides and then we'll open it up. I know eventually people will start to leave us, and if people leave before the questions answered, I just wanna kinda walk through what's left for the committee. And left on our charge, since we are not yet complete, is to complete going through the draft budget, a complete review of, as Richard was just saying, how we're approaching the net zero energy bylaw. We have additional outreach events coming up which have yet to be scheduled. We'll probably have another meeting very much like this in about two weeks, probably a different venue at a different time of day. And eventually, there'll be a final report to the school committee. And so at this point, I can open it up to any questions folks have. Again, there are some cards, if you wanna, we'd rather write it down or you can come up to one of the mics. We're gonna do our best to kinda record people's questions just so we can have them for the record and help us as we're working towards completion of this feasibility study. But any questions are welcome. And we're looking really just to make sure we have the most robust feasibility report we can achieve for the town. Maria, did you? I wanna point out that there is also a shoe box back there and you can just drop any comments into that if you're not comfortable speaking, we will be gathering those as well. All right. Okay, come up to the mic so everyone can hear. I'm Alice Swift, a former school committee member back in the 80s. We've been hearing, and you partially answered this, but we've been hearing for all these years about the wet area, the mold, and then recently, we haven't heard anything about it. We're gonna build on that. And I'm just wondering what happened to the wet, to the problem of being too wet? There's no question that the existing building has a problem with moisture. We know that moisture actually is coming up through hydrostatic pressure right up through the slab. So if you place an object on the floor and leave it for any extended period of time, you'll see moisture collecting on the underside. The building is very inadequately ventilated as well. And we suspect that there was very little, if any, waterproofing that was done underneath the slab. That's not the way you would build a building these days. We would propose to do a complete under slab waterproofing, and we would also propose to do drainage around the site, perhaps even pumps as well as gravity drainage in order to reduce the pressure of water that's underneath the building. So it's addressable. We're very aware of it. We actually spoke with our geotechnical engineer about that. There are techniques that can be used. Even if you were to pursue renovation work and save a substantial portion of the existing building, there are techniques that can be done, either by coring holes through the slab, injecting nonpermeable grout or epoxy to create a barrier between the water and the slab itself, and then those cores would be plugged. So there are techniques like that. As I said before, we've built in the riverbed before. We've also built deep excavations where there are water concerns, and so we made sure that those were addressed. It just is knowing what the issue is and then determining how best to address it. But the existing building does have problems. Hi, my name is Chris Riddle. Let's see, I've been attending these meetings and I've made some of these points to the committee. I might, at the risk of repetition, I'll repeat them to some extent. But first I will say that I also know about the zero energy by-law. Excuse me, and I know that the, how the 10% rule works, and I'll tell you how the 10% rule works, if the cost of the PV array, of the renewable energy systems exceeds 10% of the cost, the total project cost minus two or three things, I forget which, of an efficient building. It would be a 30 EUI building, not a 50 EUI building. Then if that PV array costs more than 10% of that number, then the town may put in that 10% and then by it's whatever additional electricity it needs through two or three other ways. But we're nowhere near that, I believe, the cost of the PV array we're talking about is much less than 10% more, it's about half that of the construction cost for the 30 EUI building. So I don't think we're close to that 10% threshold. Let's see. Does, then I have some questions. Oh well, and then my other major comment is that I hope that if it were that this ever happened, and this may not ever happen, but if it does ever happen, I would hope the town would decide not to use any fossil fuels either for the new construction portions and for the renovation portions. We're in a crisis situation on climate and I don't think the town of Amherst should be in the business of investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure anywhere in town. So my strong recommendation would be build this, if we do renovation, which I don't think it's a good idea, if we do the renovation then we should make sure that we use an electrified system to for heating and cooling. That's another point. And let's see. You were making reference to the energy used to generate the electricity used on site whether that the fossil fuel component of the electricity that's used on site is not relevant at least to the zero energy bylaw. The zero energy bylaw just says how much metered energy do you use and how much metered energy do you generate in a kilowatt hour basis on site? It doesn't concern itself with what it took to deliver electricity to the site if for the portions of it that are that would be used. And lastly just simply a question, does your total project cost figure include design and engineering services? That's a question. Does the total project cost figure include design and engineering services? The answer to your question is yes, it includes design and engineering services. Mary Sair, I know this is just a feasibility study, but I have a question of whether these various scenarios could be up to a larger school population. I understand that you were given 350 students, but there's a question in town of whether we can afford one school or two schools. So if it stayed at 350, that would indicate two schools. So are there, would this be relevant to being able to use this information and these scenarios for a larger school should the town decide on one school? Yes, I believe it is relevant. In fact, this would be a good model no matter how you tweak those numbers, whether it's population, size of the building, adjust the program in some way, don't put the pre-K program in there, whatever it is, there's enough facts and figures in this study that you could pull those factors out and make some adjustment either up or down. So I think it's directly relevant to whatever direction the town decides it wants to go. The population in this study is 465. That includes pre-K as well. Bruce Coldham, first of all, I compliment you on the breadth and thoroughness of this. It's really wonderful to see these kind of studies happening these days, with all of these things that we ruminated on years ago, but now finding their way into the public discussion is great. A couple of questions about your EUI, the energy use intensity of the building. You had two benchmarks, one at 50 and then another at 30. First question on that is, when you, the reduction from the 50 to the 30 KB2 per square foot a year, was that all to do with the strategies and measures related to the building itself? Or because these EWI figures are notoriously loaded with plug loads and various things related to the behavior of the people and the practices of the occupants and typically that will be about half of the total or more. So I'm interested in whether we can still go below 30 just by getting the school to behave itself a little better. You bring up an excellent point because energy consumption is related to the use of the building. So in the slide where I compared 50 versus 30, I did hint at some of these things. Yes, there are features of the building that we should consider such as additional insulation, such as triple glazing to help reduce energy consumption. But I also said you relax the temperature range or the occupancy. So for instance, in that scenario of my analysis, the 30 EWI, you're not using all of the building during the summertime. So it does force occupants to change the way they're using their building. Now, we've looked at, in other projects, automatic addressable plugs so that you can shut off all the plug loads, which is constantly draining your energy. But if you have a way to shut them off, then you've gone a long way. Or you have people shut them off. But you know how people are. I have my monitor on all night long. So you have to train people to be conscious of how they're using energy. And that goes a long way toward reducing the EWI, the intensity of energy consumption. Follow up if I may, John. Yes, I'm actually quite aware of all of that. And I know Chris is as well, because I know he's been in this game for a while. But I can see from your point of view as the design team leader that you can say, we're going to improve the window thermal performance of windows. I notice you've got stuff under the slab, walls, and so forth. There's an air-tightens factor there that you've probably made it less leaky. All these things that are, shall we say, in your control. And you can say, I'm going to turn this dial. I'm going to turn that dial metaphorically these dials to improve the performance of these building components. But my question was, beyond the very interesting idea of having people function in 78 degrees and lower humidity. And I know that's fine, because I've tracked myself for years on where my threshold is. And it's around 80, with 80 degrees, when the humidity is around 60. And I'm quite functional at that level. And I know everybody else probably could be, but there might be some complaints. But so now you're in a realm of making assumptions that you're not able to control quite so well. But so my question was, how much of those, how many assumptions beyond the two that you noted there, like, for example, expecting the school to, by all sorts of efficient equipment and use it with the kind of controls that you mentioned and the shutoffs and reducing the parasitic loads and all of that, how much of those assumptions are driven into the EWIF30? Or can we reasonably expect that with more stringent dedication on the part of the client that that number would go a little lower? You can go lower. The only assumptions I made were on that table regarding temperature. But you can drive it even lower. Even the menu you have in your cafeteria, if you use a grill that has an exhaust fan, for example, or exhaust hood, that wastes energy. So even your menu has an effect on energy consumption. None of that kind of, none of those kinds of assumptions are included in my E UI. Can you go below 30? Yes, you can. I know people who are targeting 20. We're studying a project right now in which we're in the 27 to 32 range. That's a dialogue we need to have further with the school administrators about what other kinds of functional activities, day-to-day activities and behaviors could have an effect on energy use. And we haven't had those discussions. Any other questions? And I'm gonna get my reading block. I'm gonna expand a little further, if I may, because I can't help myself. I'm an architect. So sometimes there is pushback on the part of people who do wanna conserve as much energy as possible, make the window smaller, make the window smaller, make the window smaller. At some point, I'm gonna push back. I'm gonna say we're building a school for children. There is an importance to natural light, daylight, views and so on. So I think at some point you do have to say, wait a minute, what are we doing here? What's our objective here? And I think the objective is to build as efficient a building as we can, but also a building that's very pleasant. So I'm gonna read a question. And I'm probably my, probably my throat will stay away. The question is, and I think it may be a couple of questions here, but how does the, how does adding pre-K to the building affect the cost? Right now, and Richard will correct me if I'm wrong, all the options have it in. And so I think you might wanna talk a little bit about what pulling that out, how that would affect the cost. Similarly, would it be the same amount for all the options if you're pulling out pre-K? And then there is a third question, option E without pre-K, I think that's related to that. While they're conferring, I will say we certainly did look at that and it is an identifiable number. So by the way, this is Jesse Saylor. He's an architect as well, my associate at TSKP studio. He's looking at the chart that has all of those numbers on it. And he's just comparing the column that has the 465 population including pre-K with the next column that does not have the pre-K. So if you have that print out or if you download this you'll be able to see that, but you'll find that in the difference between, let's say this column and this column. So the difference is 45 pupils, 45 full-time equivalent pupils. So the difference between there is about 4 million, less than 4 million. In some columns, it's a difference of 2 million. So I will say it's a difference between 2 to 4 million. Comments or questions? Well that's a good one, yeah. Mr. Riddle had mentioned that some of the options consider the use of maintaining these existing boilers. And that's really something we considered in a renovation scenario when we're looking at more minimal options. So it's D, E and F are the three options that would maintain the existing boilers and still be fossil fuel burning. A, B and C are all electric buildings. So just to verify that. Thank you. Other questions? I'm curious about the water situation over there again. You said that it sounds like there is water but it's dealable. So how much of a gymnastic effort is it to keep the water out as opposed to not really having to worry about it at all? I like that word dealable. It is dealable. Is it, are we going through significant gymnastics? No, what I'm describing are techniques that are pretty conventional if you're building in these kinds of geological areas. This is nothing unusual. Other parts of Amherst are blessed with more sandy soil. This particular one is more low lying but it's not something that can't be dealt with. We work with the right people who are experienced and have the right experience in these kinds of terrains. It's definitely doable. It's a related question, maybe from a different angle. Does the site exist within a flood plain that then would entail a flood insurance for any of those projects? I wouldn't bring about any differences among the options maybe but would be part of the cost. I can't speak to the insurance or what the cost impact might be. There is a flood plain on the site. It's away from the existing footprint of the building. We're trying to get that flood plain boundary precisely located. It does encroach on the footprint of the new two-story building. So maybe we have to reconsider where that is placed on the site. This is just a schematic showing the relative size but there could be an adjustment in that. Also, I believe there is an effort to confirm the mapping of the flood plain and we don't know what the status of that is just yet but the truth is yes, it's near the flood plain. Thanks. Sorry to be a hug. A question and possibly a comment. Either or both of you or any of you. The existing, this is apropos of the moisture problems in that school. The existing building, I assume, does not have any sub slab insulation. Is that correct? That is correct. Then I think it's worth mentioning for everybody so that we understand things here. There is a second and probably more important driver of moisture in this building. The concrete slab without any insulation below it is connected to the ground. Okay, number one. Number two, the ground temperature is probably going to be around 55 or so pretty much in the summer. Number three, the dew point temperatures in August and July get above 55. They get up to around 67 or 68 or 69 maybe with the way the climate's going it'll be more of that. The point being the increment means that any temperature, any dew point temperature above 55 or above ground temperature means that that ground slab, that floor slab, becomes a condensing plane. So the moisture is not coming necessarily from underneath. It's coming from the air in the summer and it condenses on that cold floor. So that's not going to be a problem in the new building and I'd say your scenario F is even because in around 92 or so the building code was amended to require sub slab insulation, especially in schools for exactly this reason. Thank you for that observation. You're absolutely correct. I didn't mention that and you're absolutely right. The moisture could be substantially from condensation occurring on this slab. Clearly I'm dealing with a lot of smart people in Hammerston so I appreciate your comment. Other comments, questions? Anyone have something they'd like me to read? Thank you very much. Oh wait, someone's coming. Sorry, okay. I was wondering if you could expand upon the HVAC options and the renewable energy options. If you could switch to our PowerPoint we have a slide showing the six options. That's good. Okay. We looked at six options. The first three are variable refrigerant flow systems which are often used in renovation projects. There's an air cooled one which is option one, a geothermal water cooled VRF which is option two. And then we looked at a cooling tower and boiler combination for option three. We also looked at chill beam distribution systems. I'm not sure you're familiar with these systems but it's a water system that brings heat and cooling to a register in the ceiling which transfers the heat from the water to the air that's being blown through the register. And so those are options four and five. We looked at a geothermal system in combination with chill beam in option four. And we looked at an air source heat pump type cooling tower in option five. And then finally we looked at a more conventional VAV air conditioning heating system which has been around for quite a while. So those were the six we looked at. This slide also gets into a little bit in terms of some of the pros and cons of each. And you can see we've rated the most conventional system option six as being the most easiest to maintain mostly because, sorry, because it's most familiar. And it's operational cost that happens to be the worst of the systems we're looking at. All the others are more efficient. And so if you compare it to option four which is the geothermal chill beam that has the best operational cost. It's the most efficient. But the geothermal wells introduce more upfront costs, capital costs to the project. So it's something we're looking at on a number of levels and so we're weighing those pros and cons of multiple systems as we think about different paths to get to an energy efficient building. The numbers we presented include option six but we also have the slide with 147 options so you can track anyone you want to. I guess this is a question for the committee. This is one of the two schools that needs replacing and the school committee is gonna be looking at a plan for going to MSBA for funding for those presumably. So how does this effort interact with that? We're hoping that the quality of our report provides the school committee and really the town at large with additional information about the costs of building on this site which hopefully also informs the cost of just building in general. Absolutely. So having done MSBA feasibility studies in the past, MSBA will require you to explore the gamut. They will ask you what does it cost to look at this site, the Fort River site, the other site, presumably the Wildwood site, or any other site in town as two schools, as one school, as additions and renovations. So we've gone a long way to satisfy what MSBA would be looking for anyway. You just need to now fill in the gaps for the other possible scenarios. Do any of these systems need backup heating or cooling systems, or do these all work? Like, because I know some of the more energy efficient options in homes, you can't use them under extreme temperatures. It's a good question and my knowledge of these systems is pretty good. I would say the air source heat pump would have a electric boiler backup and that's why we've referenced it there. So whether we do air sources, option five, which held beams, or option three with VRF, you would have that small electric boiler to make up for really low temperature days and that may be what you've experienced residentially as well, some version of that. I guess I could also mention that, and I guess it goes back to our six options. Richard had mentioned that, oh, I'm stuck. Well, if you could pan me back. A, B, and C, having more new construction in them, which is net zero according to the bylaw, are the systems that are going to get that extra 2% reimbursement that we had presented. Richard mentioned that three of our options would and three probably wouldn't. So D, E, and F would probably not get that 20% better than code and an additional 2% of reimbursement from MSVA if you recall that slide. It's hard to imagine the MRS is ever speechless. Any other follow-up questions? Thank you all for coming.