 Good evening. It is Wednesday, December 12th, 2018. This is the Fort River School Building Committee. And we are meeting at the police station in the community room. And this meeting is being reported by Inverse Media. And I'm going to go to our agenda. We call to order, approve minutes from last meeting. Unfortunately, we do not have the minutes available to circulate to approve. So we will have to pass that one. But I guess I could pause and ask if I could have a volunteer to record at least one of the two meetings. Well, you've already volunteered to do the last one. Yeah, you, yeah. And I don't mind trying to do tonight's if someone would volunteer to record minutes from the other one that's unrecorded. But we have video, so. We have video. It would have to be done from the video. And I'm sure we could probably pass together notes that we've all kind of taken. But I think the best place to start is with the recording and circulate a draft based on that. And we can gather. It's a short meeting. It is a short meeting. I can do that one. OK. What's the date on the left one? I think that's emailing around. I will email you. I'll find it when it's done. So we can, I think, move since we don't have the vote on anything. Under minutes, move to public comments. And we have some folks here. And I don't know if everyone would like to speak, or if anyone would like to speak. But I'll ask if someone wants to speak. Mr. Riddle. Chris Riddle, precinct two. I just said, Jonathan, I have talked a little bit. I understand from, more or less, from the great find that it's necessary that the designs that we are seeing for the all new project, the new all construct, the no renovation all new project requires affordable takes over parking lots and fields. And I find that my comment is that I find that surprising. It would seem like the projects that I'm familiar with, it's possible in a two story building, usually to get at least the lion's share of the PV on the roof. And so I would be interested to know what the EUI, the energy use intensity of the proposed building is that goes along with the need for PV on the parking lots and in the fields. That's a question. If I haven't viewed the draft, I think that will hopefully get addressed tonight when our designers arrive. Do the designers know that it's five? Yes. I meet him. I had several conversations with him this week. I believe it might not have been a traffic saloon in an unusual one. As opposed to the usual ones. I believe it's October 25. Other comments from the public? Not hearing any. I'm going to move on. Our next topic is, at least on the agenda, as we have it right now, would be for our designers to give us an update, which today will include permanent cost information. But we will move to the next item and come back as needed. Well, actually, what I'd really like to do is move to the item after that, because I think, Anthony, you could probably update us on what's happening with both geotech and survey. And then maybe we could have a little conversation about that in the previous item. OK. So on the survey, the fieldwork is done. Berkshire Design says that they're halfway, about 50%, done with drafting. So we stand right now. That's about all there is on that. We'll enter geotech. Who did they give into ETA? They did not. Our contract by rights end at the end of the year. Hopefully keep that timeline. The interesting thing to note, because I believe they are, in fact, a site designer that TSKP is using. And so they certainly should have information at the house that they need to give input to TSKP. But we still need the survey as an object, as a document. On geotech, I emailed before the meeting that we solicited nine companies, received three responses. They are in decreasing cost. McPhail Associates at $14,974, ENCB Consulting at $9,700, and O'Reilly, Talbot, and DoCoon at $9,000 even. I don't believe there's anything in the proposal that would preclude us from awarding them as the apparent successful bidder. But I don't know if anyone else had anything on that. The $9,000 was just a little bit under our budget, which is great. Do we need to vote on that for us? I mean, I have no choice but to award them under the law, but we can probably vote for it. Sure. OK, I guess we've got any discussion. Yeah, I guess this is going to be a discussion. All in favor of accepting that proposal. So I will draw the contract, send it to them in the morning, and hopefully have them working as soon as possible. Thank you. Yeah. This is good. Sorry, I put my hand down. I think just so the public knows, I believe in their application bid, whatever it's called, I think they indicated that the work they were anticipating would be completed by January 31st. Do I have that right, or not? Yes, that is what they said. And then report and forings, or just the billboard? It seemed that I would need it. It says the work and the proposal. So I would never do it. Yeah, that seems like a great thing. That's great. Actually, I can give a brief report and committee membership, and then maybe others know more than I do. But as far as I know, the Council is not taking up the issue of confirming appointments. So I talked to the town clerk's office today. They said that there is no impediment to appointing new members to committees now. But they will need an appointment letter for Ben Harrington or anyone else from the authority, from the appointing authority. Which is us, right? Maybe? Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I still got the impression from my last correspondence with the town manager that any appointments we suggest have to be confirmed by the town council. And that was as of the end of September. And that folks had also had to fill out the town's volunteer form, which is what I've counseled both Ben and Rudy Perkins, who has also put his name forward as potentially filling a slot to do. But if we should write a letter, another letter. I mean, this appears to be our open question, is who is the appointing authority? Because we were constituted by the school committee, not select board or town council. And then the school committee devolved that authority to us. I mean, if nobody will appoint them unless town council gives us a say so, then I guess that's the way it is. It seems strange to me. I will go with the town council's suggestion. And if there's a hiccup, then we can go through the other one. But the clerk is saying there's no impediment. We should go ahead and appoint. This feels like a circle. Because unfortunately, that's where I started many, many six months ago. But now she's saying it's OK? Well, perhaps at this time, they will give me the formwork for the letter. Because I couldn't get past that point at a certain point. But yes, we'll follow that path, too. So it was the March 2018 meeting of the Amber School Committee, where they said that we have the authority to fill our own vacancies. So I'd like to suggest that maybe we send a letter from the committee online have it maybe or not be me, but just direct a letter. And if nobody has objections to you doing that and sending it on our behalf or getting an electronic signature or something like that, I would send it to the town clerk. Or for the suggested names. Yeah. Worst thing that happens is they then have to fill out a committee volunteer form. They would have to. Yeah, I think I would have to work on that. Or you push the paperwork, right? Worst thing happens is then, oh, sorry, that's not going to work, but we'll have to take a good paperwork. Can't hurt. That's what we'll do. Do we need to talk about, I mean, we've talked about that. Yeah, I mean, I think it went to everybody. I assume everyone got the note from Lee Perkins, who at least from reading the email was on the group that helped form the bylaw, which is, I think, very helpful to our group to understand how we should apply it to this project or not to our feasibility study. Personally, I'd be in favor of having it on board. Maybe in good perspective. The net-zero bylaw. Yeah, sorry, the net-zero bylaw. Do others have thoughts? Should we have a formal motion? I think we've had more to defend, so we could probably do the same thing for Rudy. I guess I'd ask, can someone make a motion to whatever we're going to call it? A point. A point. There's the right word, Rudy Perkins, to the currently open slot for a green energy expert. You'll also move to a point. Rudy Perkins to the green energy expert slot for a green school building committee. Second. All in favor? There we go. OK. So that was committee membership. We talked a little bit about meeting mid-taking, and I will try to record tonight's. And I'm sure I'll be using everything to help me out. Let's, since TSKP is not here yet, let's go back to public outreach. Something, oh, sorry, something. Well, just moving forward, are we going to try to do internal wing meeting minutes from here and out? I would like to try it for a little while. We've had a hard time meeting someone that we can achieve a rhythm with self-volunteerism. At least we'll know that we've got something as opposed to having to work backwards. I don't know what other people think. I guess we thought it wasn't really high on hiring someone in the first place. But it's how the year we're dealing with it right now. It's going to be, what, six weeks? Right. It's going to be the fastest. How much longer is this committee going to have? It's not too much longer after that. The spring will be done. So I think we can take on that to ask ourselves. Other thoughts or questions? OK. Do you want to do handvoices? I don't know, do we have any? Do we have handvoices? Yeah, we have handvoices, too. OK. Yeah, let's do that. Super productive meeting, by the way, if they ever show up. I hope they do. I hope so, maybe. I didn't check the thing email right before I walked over. I hope that there wasn't a dramatic accident or something. But do folks have questions on their current invoice or anything do you want to preface this week with that? It's invoice number two for $15,000, bringing us to $90,000 total. That note at the bottom that says still outstanding, that's my handwritten note about that we did in fact cut a check for that. They probably just hadn't received it when they printed the invoice, too. But I have no comments on it. Questions? Move to approve the invoice for TSKP for $50,000. Second? All in favor? Motion passes. We have the luxury of actually being able to talk a little bit about public outreach, and while we would also like to have TSKPs kind of put on their part of it, I think this gives us an opportunity to talk a little bit about the schedule of when that can happen, maybe the nature of it. I'm also thinking since we've had a hard time, having enough time to talk about this, that at least we could talk about whether or not we want it. At one point, we had a working group which kind of talked, was tasked with outreach, whether we should, that group should meet again, could be another thing to talk about, I don't know. We would like to start this topic after I grab a lot of it. I can start. I think I asked you, did you manage, I asked you to ask TSKP a little bit about what they have been doing in other places for kind of form. I think we can discuss a lot, but if they don't, they... Yeah, they're going to be a very big part of whatever it is we do. So they have to be part of the conversation. I think we cannot make all the decisions without having to consult with them. I mean, I think what I can say so far is we can kind of think of, to some degree, what they do with us, but more pointedly, the joint meeting we have with the school committee is kind of a taste of part of what that would be like. There would be a big piece of it that would be kind of a presentation of the progress to date. But I think there would also be a, that was more a contained thing that wasn't kind of that back and forth with the public that would be part of that. Mike, you said one thing to be always aware of, like even in these meetings where the school committee is a great example, it's just there's so much information to share, and what's the balance between sharing information so that people can give authentic feedback and giving people an opportunity to offer that feedback. I know that our kids don't think to say about that, but I think that's always a challenge. How can you offer the feedback until you understand like even the public comment we see tonight? It's a really good question, but there has to be some exchange. And so I guess the question is how much we want presentation, how much we want given back and forth and questions, and then dialogue, and what's the, maybe one thing that the group could talk about is what's the feasibility committee's role during those? Is it really a lay observer, and it's really for the public to interact with the architects, or is there a larger role that the committee wants to play in that relationship? Just a quick two cents. No, so we're gonna have fun talking and writing at the same time. I think I agree about the information. I think if you go and present everything at once, people will have time to digest. I think we have the advantage that we have been posting almost all the documents online. So when the farm is announced, it should be announced with the big reference to the web page, so people are very interested. They can go and look at almost up-to-date information that we have, so that they can have a little bit more questions if they have. Besides looking at it directly, you can have, you can take a look at the documents before it comes. The first time you see is there. But it also does kind of make you wonder if there are really two sessions where one is more informational, and people have time to absorb it, but then is it really the same group that comes back the next time? I don't know, it's just a thought, not a suggestion. I think it has to be one, because if two people work, asking too much time, I think it has to be one, and we tend to digest it. Is there someone else jumping in? I don't mean to talk in conversation, but I think also just understanding that the public who comes are in really different ranges. I agree with everything you've already said. We have really different ranges of experience. Some people who are in the field, some people who won't look at the website because for whatever reason, they won't be able to interpret it because they don't come from this background, and I think that's also one of the challenges how to right fit a presentation and education ease, how to differentiate the program so that if you're someone who's been attending these meetings and is in the field, you have access and can share it, but also someone who comes in who hasn't looked at one thing but cares deeply about the schools, can come in and also get enough information where they can ask questions, and that's a real challenge. And I think that's a clear place where we're gonna be looking for a little bit of guidance on CSKB on the right way to do that, because this should not be the first one they've ever done, and we know it's not. We're in. I agree with everything you're saying. I think maybe because we need the, we need CSKB for content, maybe we can talk a little bit about timing and format, and do we wanna do a big presentation, we do wanna do it a couple different times. The day we wanna have, we've talked about also doing something like office hours to make ourselves available for one conversation, so it's not in a big forum. I mean, I like that idea. And if we do a large presentation to be mindful to maybe have it in town to be more accessible. I think having it in accessible location is critical as we wanna reach as many people as we can. And I'm gonna throw out maybe asking to have a slot on the very crowded and lettered town council agenda to make a presentation there. That's a good question, yeah. I mean, let's step back and think about the broad time piece. My guess is that the school committee would probably like us to come back and have another joint session at some point. And it probably makes sense to have that public outreach after that. So if the school committee kind of gets to hear what we've been hearing, is that a fair guesstimate of what your colleagues might wish? Yeah, I think it's fair. I think that my guess is the next time you would want to hear is after these cost estimates have been further refined or at least sort of the analysis is further refining whatever way it's going to be. And then prior to a draft report being sort of put to bed so that there's a level of opportunity to both hear numbers and analysis that seems at that point pretty solid, but also early enough, just early enough, that if some of this, I think it's true with the public too, that if there were questions that came up to help frame or improve the framing of the final deliverable, that public school committee both have an opportunity to weigh in at a point where they can have an impact on that. Meaning if there's a question that could be answered better that wasn't well answered or wasn't considered to be highlighted for some sort of reason, it came at a point in the process where they could hear that feedback, we could hear that feedback and say gosh, you know that in the last sense and then you could really patch it around. Makes sense? I would agree, yes. And I would like to really make that really explicit exactly that point that kind of the deliverable at the end of this process is not a building, it's not. So when we're going to the public, what we're asking of them is not your vote for this or it's like we want to produce a document that helps this town make it to start, that's helpful for us as we move forward and decision making about how to address these things. And so we're asking the public, we need your feedback on this document that we're producing. And I think that's maybe where our role comes in or we delegate that to the architects but making sure we, you know, the committee's work has been very narrow and specific but it's in this context of a bunch of stuff that is incredibly not narrow and specific as there couldn't be any more moving pieces in trying to solve this puzzle. And so when we, you know, having the public understand what the work product is of this committee will help get us feedback that I think is relevant to what the committee can do with it. And I, unless, I mean, we see our role in this committee as starting that bigger conversation and I don't think it is. So I think when we enter these meetings with the public being very explicit about this is what we're going to do with this feedback, we're going to refine our document then we will have that will be something that lives as something that will help inform this next conversation that we're going to have. Yeah, I would wholeheartedly agree with that that we're not framing, we're not going to guide that conversation. We're providing information to that conversation for the school committee, for the public, for the town council. We want to hear back, I think, and what the designers to hear. Do we have the right information? Do we have, including the right information? Yeah. And that's where I don't mind people coming to me rephrase this. I like the fact that members of the public are going to come in with their own lens. That doesn't bother me at all because in the end, the strength of the study is that if somebody is all in, not just let's say for compliance with the net zero bylaw, but actually having that zero building, do they feel like this report provides a fair or reasonable analysis of what that looks like on this site? Regardless of, and I suppose it'd be true if you were skeptical of that, that you'd say was this also a fair or reasonable analysis in the sense that it wasn't, that the information was good information analysis, good information. I mean, as the question came up earlier, what goes into deciding how much PV is necessary for this site? How much of it can be on the roof? How much of it has to be in the field? What other alternatives are there? I mean, my point is, somebody who's going to be looking at the same, this is true also, if you go A through E, any of those options, somebody may have walked in with a cognitive lens that says, I'd prefer, I think this is the right kind of answer, then they read through it, let me understand this better. I'm hoping that not only they get really useful information, but that somebody sees value and good analytical depth of information in each of these alternatives doesn't feel gained for an outcome, which in terms of what the public's framed out. I think that's a pretty good argument for maybe having an earlier session, the earlier presentation to the public to get some input, because if we wait until after we've done another presentation and gone through a cycle with the school committee, we've already gone down a path and we're missing the opportunity to have input from members of the public who don't happen to be at this table or in our audience now, so maybe it make, and I think we did schedule, you had me correct me if I'm wrong, did we have two public, large public presentation opportunities and maybe we need to be thinking about doing something earlier, even before we've completed our next bunch of work. I think we, or at least I'm not talking personally, I think I would like to make sure I'm really comfortable with where they have the numbers. I don't feel like we have to be done done, but I think you go before the public and feel unconfident about what they're presenting to the public. That's the only caveat I would like to think about. That by the way was what I meant. I actually didn't, I'm not, I mean, this is where I can't speak for the committee. I don't actually think there's any particular value in having the school committee hear this before the public. If the point of the exercises is we've just described it, I mean, I just really don't. What I strongly believe is that, not that everything has to be locked down, but it would be deaf to go before the public and someone saying, well, how do you understand how these numbers were arrived at? And your answer is, well, we're figuring that. I mean, I know that's making that up. It's unfair, like a bad straw man. The point is that if we're figuring it out, then that's like a bad answer for us, right? We have to, just farther on along than that, that what we're presenting is, we feel pretty comfortable with. It feels like we're on the same page. So kind of with that in mind, I can imagine depending on how we, we kind of were able to absorb the information we get tonight, so they arrive. Because I'm getting more nervous by the day. You're so nervous by the day. I don't know if I have anybody's cell phone. I got an idea. I don't want to make a motion. After this meeting, when you get into the consultants, that we get a cell phone. Yeah, I'm feeling that that should have occurred to me. No, I'm not being critical. I'm just being like, because right now the biggest thing is, there may be a really excellent reason why they're never going to arrive today. Yeah. And that'd be great to know that. I actually, I bet they're going to arrive at six, and I think that means at six. Do you think that's, I mean, it's possible, but. I have been thinking five, three, but not anymore. I know I made it as clear as I could be, but you know, I've also been on the other side, the seat, and it says, oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, I heard you say five, except I heard you say six. We have the phone numbers of the office. We could ask someone to step out while we look for them. We could recess. Yeah, we could recess and try to stay on this. I'm happy to do it. Yeah, Mike could do it. I mean, yeah, if you could try to do that. I have this feeling that they kind of work public school hours, because they work a lot in public schools, and so the receptionist is probably left. But if we can give it a try, we'll have to give it a try. Thanks. Regarding timing, if we're going to do public outreach, we need to start announcing it. Not going to do it soon, but I don't think it would be able to happen before the university starts on mid January, I don't think. Considering, we don't know when we are meeting again, and how long it will take to refine numbers, not being confident that we can do it before January 15th? Yeah, I don't think we could pick it. I don't think we could successfully pick a date tonight, but if we could manage to meet early ish in January, I still think, I'm hoping we could have a date towards the end of January, but just literally spitballing something. That's why I was kind of wondering if it wouldn't make sense for a working group of us to get together to kind of sort out some possible dates, just so that this piece maybe could still be happening despite a gap in our meetings. Like if it's hardly known the schedule right now, in our school community meetings in the winter, once, there's one in January, which is the 22nd, and then the other one because of the winter recess is the 26th of February. So you got kind of pretty big window between those two dates. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it before, but just I thought it'd be helpful to know when the schedule of school community meetings actually are. There's no more until then, is that right, please? Oh no, there's a meeting on Tuesday of next week. I'm sorry, I was looking at months, but you know. That's just the Amherst, and then that regional too? I just mentioned the Amherst school community meetings. I'm sorry. No, there's a bunch of regional meetings. Regional is awesome, but they're secret. And it's super early, right? We were at last night's meeting, 10, 30, 40. I mean, is that something we should avoid too, though? I mean, what are the big things we need to avoid when scheduling for school committee meetings? That's a good question. School events, school events. So we've got the school calendar for that. Council meetings, potentially. Boy, that's a thorny question. I mean, that's, again, another reason to maybe schedule a group to sit down with the town and school calendars and just see what's left of January and February. I think they most, it sounds like they're meeting mostly on Mondays, which I think otherwise are not great nights for public outreach. If we generally agreed as a group that we, I mean, A, we see a value doing for them. Yeah. For it being two, but one sooner or later. We generally agree with the concept of it. We generally agree that as soon as we feel comfortable that we're comfortable with the number and we think it'd be valuable to do that exercise, then I think it'd be great to just decide that we wouldn't like that working group get together with somebody with you, Tom, and to try to find the right date and knock down a date because we need to do it. Yeah, because it's not one of these things where we're posting an agenda two days ahead and expecting it to show up. We need to make noise and get publicity out. Yeah, so setting a date. So I can see the working group working on setting a date, coming up with an advertising strategy, which I don't know, maybe it is just this, that's for the working group to figure out. What else would that working group be work on? Right? Security, security menu? Yeah, so setting a date, yes. Yeah, that was it. Date, advertising, the menu. So just, I don't need to be in the working group necessarily, but just if the venue stuff, that's something I can be helpful with. The other thing to note is that there's a group aboard that's studying mutualization between the town of Amherst and the town of Pellam, and they're also looking at engagement. Probably not on a wildly different schedule than what this group is. So I also sort of can interface between the two groups to make sure that we're not picking the same night. Because that could happen, right? And they haven't picked dates, but I think they've gotten closer to that. But I just wouldn't want to, or even if it was the night after, right? Even if it's two nights in a row that might be, it's possible that it'd be someone who was interested in going, you know. So, maybe that's something that's unavoidable that's not that many dates in the winter. Right, we'll start running out, but just another one to be cautious about, particularly looking at elementary families in a similar way that I think this will draw a lot of elementary school families. I'm not making you to be on that committee. Anybody, working group? Anyone else? That's what happens, Mike. Or at least we'd be in communication with you. No, no, no. I think it makes logical sense. I certainly don't mind the technical, just the cool parts. I have more of the access than others. Yeah, yeah. I'm happy to do it. I don't mind serving on that. Yeah. Do we need more than two people? Yeah, I'd be good to just, they have a third body to help out logistics. That sounds good. I think it's super productive. I just want to point that out. We're getting a lot of things. This is very cathartic. This is the first time we really had a chance to talk about anything in depth. It's important to be affirmed. So I did pull up our community outreach outline, which talked about how we have a website, and we have an email address, and library binder, and all that stuff, which all that stuff has held true pretty good, and we've been doing press releases as well. So what we put down for public forums, is we said we were going to do three of them total. And this was always, the big headline at the top of this thing was like, we're going to revise this as we go along. So I'll read what it said here. And then we had also had, during a public meeting, talking with the architects, which didn't agree with this either. So we said we were going to have three total, one of each of the following milestones, preliminary options development, refined options with cost estimates, and then after the final report, each form will explain where we are in the process of the feasibility study and solicit feedback from the public. Feedback can be gathered at the event and we gather through the committee's email address. Each form will be recorded by Amherst media and be available for viewing through the committee's website. We had said the desired location for be the town hall. We said the timing, we would target with day evenings and we would advertise through press releases and flyers at Amherst's three libraries. That's where we're at when we drafted that thing. So we should update this when we settle it. So we missed the preliminary options development. So, but I still think the two still makes sense, the final two. Although maybe, I guess we should talk about whether or not we want to have that final one after the final draft, or do we want to have that before? I don't know. I think it's going to be too close together. At this point, we're bunching up. I think afterwards, we're setting the final. The final findings, I guess. Yes. The final findings. The final advice that we'll be... I mean, I feel like, oh, sorry. I have a question. I think that when we did our RP for the architects, didn't we specify how many we wanted? We should probably go back and look at that. Yeah. I don't think it was any fewer than two though. No. No. So, either way, since that's what we've contracted with them for, we should probably go back and look and see, yeah. Yeah? There was a follow-on, too. I had something to follow up around, something you said that I chose together. Oh, sorry. There's no way before the final is going to be too close together to this one. So, there won't be, I think it's better to present the final results, because if not, people are going to stay away and go, oh, where's the final? Yeah. I think when we talked to the architect about doing it, I think we were talking about two, and I don't remember what was in the RP, but we had talked about doing one about, with the cost estimates, about now, and then, because they were sort of talking about, we'll just do one, and I said, we really need to give the, we really need to go back to the public one more time to say, did we hear you right? And I feel like that's basically in the final report zone. And I feel like we could have, basically do the final presentation, but maybe not have the final, final report written. So, the work product at the very end could still incorporate any final comments that come out of the last presentation, I think. Right, because the truth isn't final, till we deliver it. Yeah. Or there could be an appendix or something that we had, you know, final feedback. You know, if we wanted to have kind of a final report to at least present, it could be that was a final wrap. Yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah. What do you think it's about, I don't know. Good idea. Well, other comments, questions on outreach, we can email amongst ourselves on when we can find the time to get together. So, what people agreed to have a tentative date at the end of the last week of January or before the last week of January, so that we have a target. So, we start looking in that week and if not, we're gonna go randomly looking. So, if we say the week of Martin Luther King, he's the week that universities start, so I don't know, some people might be tuned to that. Why don't we say we're gonna, I'm gonna propose that we'll initially target the end of January, leave it a little bit looser, we'll meet as a group and see what we can come up with. Hey, good timing. We got a lot done before you got here. Are we ready? Well, depends on when you thought you were supposed to be here, but yes. Yes, so I guess we could move to have a, whatever you call it, a free clause, a free sentence, a free clause. All in favor. Let's call it, yeah, five or 10 minutes, whatever it takes them. If folks want to use the restroom or anything, I think that's a success. You can follow completely the bouncing ball of this one. So, are you ready? Are you ready? Yep, I'm ready. So, we're calling this meeting back into session from our mini recess. We are now gonna turn to the topic of the resuscitation by our fix, the SPP, and I guess I'm gonna preface this slightly before turning it over to you all just to say this is our first conversation around costs. I'm sure we'll have several more. And if you can, before you dive in too much, it might be good if you could give us a little context about what is most helpful to you to hear tonight about what you're presenting. Or at least, if you don't start with that, slip it in there somewhere so we can make sure we give you the best feedback we can. Well, as you know, we've been developing these options with you and we've taken them down to our last meeting. And so we have a lot of feedback which we're gonna share tonight. And I think what's most helpful to us is to confirm that the way we've seen the project, the way we've been thinking about it is consisting of the way that you want us to think about the project. So it's the scope of the project. And to a great extent we've defined that in our sketches as we've spoken with you about these various options. But there may be some areas where that's not been fully defined and it may have lived in our narratives which we shared a few prior to going to the estimator but I think you've had a chance to digest over time. So it'll be helpful I think to look at the numbers and react to that. And certainly we've had those narratives. We've never had the opportunity to talk about them. And so it's possible there are gonna be questions tonight that may be informed by the narratives. And so you may have to pull on some of that. Sure. To give us context. I think we can do that. So maybe we should start going through the presentation. Yeah. Wait on all the questions at the end or we can move? I think if people have a really pressing question on the slides that's in front of them they can feel free to ask it. But as much as possible let them kind of walk us through it and then come back and stuff. We've said that since the inspiration. So this kind of is responding to what you just asked. What are our goals? And so we just want to review what we went through in terms of budgeting and phasing. Phasing is part of this presentation as well. And present the budget options which relate to other design options. And then the assumption is what I was getting at. What is the scope of this project? And we wanna make sure that we are thinking the same thing. As I mentioned we work with an independent estimator and we've shared a few reports that they've created out of the options that we provided in our pricing area. This is paid for one of the reports. It shows options A, B, C, D, E and F. And then the enrollment variations on those options which is A, A1, A2, A3 for each letter. It also talks a little bit about how you might procure this project. Whether you would go seeing that risk or design bid built with a GC. And I can tell you that the numbers we've worked with in the rest of the presentation are the CMF risk numbers which are higher in this case. Is that, I mean, now I'm gonna need to rock those real quick, is that because that's what the MSBA typically- No, the MSBA was providing an extra reimbursement incentive point to use CMF risk, but they've now stopped doing that. And there are some advantages to seeing that risk when we get into a phased renovation. Having one person that can think through all that phasing in a way that's amenable to your needs as you're operating the building is probably a real advantage. But when we get to option A and B, which are, well, A in particular, being a new building, I think you could look at the design bid build option. That would probably work pretty well. But to be apples to apples at this point, we did everything to see the risk. This is the second page, I believe, or you'll find this in the estimator package as well. Just wanted to go through, somewhat briefly, this reoccurring page. This happens for each of the six options. And you'll see that the costs for the project are broken down. The estimator has worked with our areas for new construction and demolition, which is on our sketches, as well as our PD panel areas, which are itemized there in the top column. And so, and some site assumptions which we can talk through, as well as hazardous waste removal. So all of that stuff added together is your total direct cost. That's not your construction cost yet. To get to construction costs, we need to consider contingencies, design contingency, construction contingency, escalation, we're not building this right now, we're looking ahead. We've carried till the fall of 2020. We weren't quite sure where to put that, but we put it out a few years. And we've carried that the same through all the options. And everything I've mentioned so far in terms of after direct costs, the contingencies are all the same for all the options. For general conditions, we have a 24-month schedule for all the A options. They're all new buildings. And when we talk about phasing later, you can see that we adjust the construction duration according to our analysis of phasing. So that does change between the options according to how long we think construction duration will be. And then there's permit, fund, general requirements. These are in profit. These are all gonna be the same for all the options. So those need to be added in to get to construction costs, which is towards the bottom in the black rectangle. And then there's a cost per square foot divided out, which you had asked for for construction costs. Now that has the site in it. So that's your overall total construction cost per square foot. And then you can see at the bottom, there are the five HB options, which we've also priced. And the way those work is, they're in addition to the base option, which is option six. We had understood that, well, after we had presented the HBHC options, we had some feedback saying option six might be the most familiar to the town in terms of maintenance. It's also happens to be the least expensive, so it worked well, so that all the other options are a little bit more than option six. Some are significant and more. And so we've, in our matrix, which is coming up, we've built in the cost for the HBHC options. And so here's our matrix, so all of the price and feedback we've received. It's a little truncated here, but you can see option A, B, C, D, E, and F, we've gone through this before. The different enrollments are four columns under each letter. As you recall, those enrollments are the 465, which is your K through six school at 420 students plus a 3K of 45 students. The 420 is just a K through six school of 420 students. 360 is your existing school population plus a 3K program of 45 students, and 315 is the existing school population. So we had looked at all those, and then we also looked at six HBHC options. But I put in yellow boxes. The yellow boxes represent the ones we actually drew, because as you know, you've seen drawings of one option A. And on that drawing, you'll notice it'll point out, well, here's the pre-K square footage, and so that's how we get to 8.1. The estimator took that out, and then we looked at it with six HBHC options. So these are really the ones that receive more attention, and everything after that is a little bit of an extrapolation. So bear that in mind. This slide is to talk about how we go from construction costs to overall project costs. Construction costs includes what it takes to build a building, but it doesn't include what we call soft cost items. This is furniture and technology. This is fees for the design team for other consultants, special testing. There's a number of things that go here. Your owners represent that would be here at their fee. And so we used a pretty conservative multiplier. We multiplied by 1.3, or 30% is what we increased to go from construction costs to project costs. That's something we could look at. We benchmarked another project in Massachusetts. We were a little less than that. So we might have been a little over-conservative in that number, if you want to come back to that, we can. You can answer the question. Sure. Because if you compound the contingencies, last these, it adds up to 15% of the construction cost. Of the direct cost. Of the direct cost. It adds up to 58% or 6%. I'll take your word for that. What I will say is, I wouldn't conflate them. But there are two different groups of things we can talk about both. But this one is taken from the direct cost that already has some contingencies. It's true. They do kind of do this sort of. It's not 30% of the direct cost per state. It's 30% of the all that already has 25, 23, 40, something percent of contingencies. This is pretty typical across the industry. That is typically the way you would do that. Okay. We can talk about the parts of it, and I think they're important parts to talk in there, but that is not unusual. Okay. Just because it's, I always have something that the sub-cost would go with the direct cost, not with the contingencies. Yeah, we usually have that at the end. And we would have the fortune factor. But I think we picked a pretty high factor. Could you repeat what the multiplier was? Would it use? We used 1.3. Okay. And it was the same, I meant to say it's, it was the same across all the options. Again, we did apples to apples. We didn't think about, you know, maybe if we do option E there's a little less speed for something or other. We didn't get into that kind of granularity at this point. It's necessary. And so here are all the project costs now. So this is basically the same slide you saw in black, but everything's no multiple part by 1.3. And so that would be your total project budget. You see this project with these numbers. Don't think I need to dwell on the numbers right now. We'll probably come back. There was a question about PV panels, how much they cost and how the different systems would affect the quantity of PV panels. And how much is net zero? Because we know we have to do net zero for this project. What's the pre-mean there? Think about that. And so. And before you get into the full answer that before you arrived there was a question from the public comment period asking about how the EUI of the building affect the overall. And I know this slide partly addresses that by one, because it's a lot better. Perfect, yeah. So if you remember EUI is the energy use intensity. Now, if you're net zero, the overall energy use intensity when you take into account the solar panels is zero. But the question is, how many solar panels do you need to make up the EUI of the building? In other words, the building needs a certain amount of energy. You need to have solar panels to offset that. So this slide shows two strategies. If we were to set the building EUI at 50, the higher number of the two we're going to look at, we need more solar panels. We need more affordable takes. The pink area, if you look at all the pink area on the slide is the amount of affordable takes we need for our EUI at 50. And the cost is $442,000 project costs. So you'll find a smaller number if you look in the estimate under direct costs because it doesn't have all those adders added into it that we talked about. So this is now the project cost. It's been increased to represent the overall project burden of the affordable takes. So that's the net zero premium in our minds because a building of a EUI of 50 is pretty conventional construction for us. We've done a number of schools at that level of performance and we're not getting pushed into, let's say, the more premium building technologies that are out there that start to have more costs associated if you follow me. So we looked at it and said, well, if we go to a EUI of 30, we could have fewer affordable takes. If you look at the site plan, for the ground-mounted array, which is to the east of the building or above the building and the site plan, there's a black line identifying an area of PV that would be required if we went to 30. The lighter-colored PV wouldn't be needed. It's about 60% of the area that you would still need over the parking you'd still need on the building. So the PV panel cost, if we made the building performance better and brought it down to a EUI of 30, the PV panel cost is reduced to 265,000. So you would save a little less than $200,000 by reducing the building EUI. However, there's a cost increase beyond what we've estimated into the cost for the building to make the envelope better and to potentially use geothermal systems to get to that EUI of 30. So that's what we also listed in that EUI of 30 analysis. We put the cost for the geothermal option, which is an additional 2.38 million project, as well as increase for envelope, 2.53 million project. And that's reflecting going to triple-paying windows, that's going full insulation under the slab. And I can give you a better summary of all those things that we think would be involved to get to EUI of 30. But I'm hoping the overall concept is coming through that our basis throughout the estimating was to use the EUI of 50 approach to take a more conventional building and have more solar panels because the cost of the solar panels is relatively not that much compared to the cost to make a premium building. You have the luxury of acreage that a lot of sites don't, a lot of products don't, and that allows you to do, as Jesse mentioned, a much more conventional building and still achieve your goal of net zero. Whereas if we didn't have that room, then we would really be forced into a building with a much better EUI. And the site element shown is consistent with what is existing right now. Like we've got two soccer fields and one ball field or is that because we never really talked about the programming of the site in this committee much. I totally understand. Well, in this option, because we're doing the new building with a smaller footprint, I think it's pretty equivalent in that you have two good soccer fields. Now they're where the old building used to be and you have the baseball field. You did have a baseball field overlay with your soccer field. So we could probably show a baseball field here as well. But yeah. Just to follow up on that conversation, not that I want to open this can of worms, but the school really, those fields are used by the community more so than the school. So just wanted the community to understand that what we're showing here is well beyond what a typical elementary school building would have for even with the solar panels there. Now, we certainly use it as a community source, but. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean, I guess we're saying we could do less solar panel area, but there would be a premium for that. And that's not been rolled into these numbers. Typically these numbers are the top case where we went to a EUI of 50. And we didn't put a lot of pressure on the building because I'm trying to get to a better energy performance every now and then. So all the sunsets are EUO 50? Yes, yes. So the other thing we noted is that PV panel. So I guess that's your net zero premium in our estimate is that 442,000 for option A. It would be basically half of that for option B and a third of that for option C and keep going down. But PV panels could be procured via a lease agreement, our purchase agreement, which I think would then remove any cost of the project. So some of this, I guess that's up to the town as to whether they would consider doing that. But a lease agreement would not have a project cost. So net zero could be zero in that point of view. Zero cost. Mr. Real, I sense a question. May I, I'm not a member of the... I'm going to break a little protocol. I think you're going to read us from the net zero bylaw here in a second, which I think would be helpful. Well, I was instrumental in creating the net zero bylaw. There's wording in there that doesn't, set an EOI, hard EOI standard, but the intent, certainly the intent of the bylaw is to build a very energy efficient envelope, very energy efficient HVAC system, and to minimize the need for PV. So, and that's my first reaction. My second is we have three two-story buildings in this town that are net zero that do not have collectors on the floor, on the ground, or on the, over the parking. So I find it surprising that we can't make it work with a two-story building. And presumably, school has had our ventilation requirements and might need more than two of the three buildings that I'm thinking of. That would be South Congregational Church and, oh dear, the building next to Gordon Hall was a cog, a new building on campus. So I'm surprised that we have, that there's as much PV on the site as you have there. I'm quite surprised. And what is the efficiency? That's the third question is, what is the efficiency of the collectors you're proposing there? I'll have to check. And then I would just sort of strongly advocate for EOI 30 or something around there. That's not having a slab, not having insulated slab, not having triple glazing, all that sort of stuff. Doesn't sound like a net zero building to me. And that's kind of why we raised this, is what is a net zero building to you? Is it just balancing as we read the code strictly? I think that's all you'd have to do to meet the code. But if our moral goal is to do something better, you could. And we could do it. We've done EOI 30 buildings before for schools. Okay. Yeah, I think we still had the bylaw out. If, was there specific language, like what is the language that is trying to, to give you a second? Driving, you know, first, do energy efficiency, second, do panels. And when you find it, you can just start your panel. Why don't you, it's been a while since I've done this. Can you give me a little time? Yeah. Do something else for a while? So this is a, I, we have a lot more to cover, so I'd like to ask this question quickly. This is a great example where I'm curious what kind of feedback you're looking for, because if I think maybe before you came in, we might have been talking about this, that in my mind, regardless of what we run through as a scenario for option A, I actually like having a report that lays out the alternatives and the costs and benefits associated with different alternatives, so that somebody can understand what a building with an EOI of 50 and solar looks like. I might even like to know what it looks like. I don't know, there's a way of estimating what the cost of power purchase would be and so the operating cost of the building based on that. And then also similarly, doing an EOI of 30 with a reduced number of solar, but a tighter building, I believe. I actually like having that information. But what are you looking for from us tonight? I'm happy to provide that. I think we've provided that information and I think we would wrap this into the report. If you'd like this to go further. Chris. In terms of operating costs, if we have some information you can share today, grab us a little further in time, very much. I just want to pose that we've left them. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Which is a good segue to see the requirements. Okay, so just one, I mean I guess the one question is like it seems like which one of these would we want to include as the baseline? Right now we're including the 30, excuse me, the 50 as the baseline. I don't think this committee might be more interested in including the 30 as the baseline for our estimate numbers because that's, I mean the one liner coming out of this committee is the cost. And the one liner I think really needs to reflect the values of the community as much as it can. So let's move on and come back to it because I think there's a follow-up question that has to do with how do we make sure that the other ones are comparable. Yeah, I'd like to hear that comment, but let's get through the rest of it. Chris, go ahead. General presentation. It's in the definition of zero energy capable. The definition of the building has to be zero energy capable. The envelope does. Designed based on the energy budget in a compliance with the zero energy requirements incorporating highly efficient standards to minimize the project need for energy and incorporating renewable energy systems with enough capacity to supply the energy needed. And so incorporating highly efficient standards. That's our, which we ended up deciding to try not to tag that to an EUI, but certainly the spirit of the bylaw is to build a really terrific envelope and a really terrific HVAC system. I understand that. To get to your operating cost question, we haven't done a full analysis, but we have a slide, which I think we showed you previously, which maybe you can spend a little more time with tonight. Our current energy cost per year for Port River School is very close to that average current EUI of 110, and it's 116, $117,000 per year of course it fluctuates year to year. That number is so precise. All these numbers are unnecessarily precise. They're the result of calculations, so there's going to be a range. Just bear that in mind. Green building, or high performance at 65 EUI, or green building at 55, 50 were doing better than both of those categories as given to us from our lead consultant. But you can see the cost of the green building is a good amount less, 57,821. Now of course you'd be net zero in option A, so your utility cost would be zero. So you could think about that. The 10 years of not doing a project and going on with the Port River School would be 10 times, or 16,000, so over a million, versus a net zero building would be zero. Or you could also think about the renovation, push it. I think probably the renovation is going to be more like a 65. It's going to be harder to push that up to the 50. The previous slide, as you remember, dealt with new construction, but some of these options have renovation. So you could start to think about those renovation areas. Over 10 years would be under a million dollars, but still significant. So that may help you think about operational costs. And we could write that out a little bit more. So the next part of the presentation is about phasing. Just keep moving through it. We thought about how much time and what the process would be to construct each of these options in a little more detail. There's a gradient, again, to a certain extent, that option A, which is a new building, and it's very simple, because you just build the building next to the existing footprint. And we think that could happen in 24 months. Sometimes it even goes down to 22 months, but over 24 would be conservative a little bit. And then as we're doing more smaller additions, we have less swing space, and so the phasing's getting more complicated as you'll see, and the duration goes up. So let's dive into it. So option A, we don't have diagrams for because it's so straightforward. Option B, the blue shows what's being built at this time. The gray shows the existing. So we're building the new two-story addition in option B on the right side, and we're renovating the corridors to create a connection. We have a duration of about a year for that. It's a little more or less. And then now that that blue area is done, we're now renovating sort of the center of the building, where we have these corridors connecting between the existing areas on the left side and the new areas on the right side. We have classrooms on the first floor on the left side and then also on the second floor, which you don't see, which are on the right side. So it achieves the number of blocks you have now and it gets easier. And then finally, we've finished renovating that interior space and we can demolish the part we were intending to demolish to get to our final option B plan. Option C is gonna be the same concept again. In this case, the new addition is smaller. So we're building the addition and we're renovating the gym. In the summer, we're gonna be renovating the classrooms to get a quarter connection through. We've been building mechanical space over here, new mechanical space, and then backfeeding. And then in the second phase, we're now renovating the interior of the building because we've already renovated the classrooms we have connections through. So the building is larger than it needs to be at the end. So we're able to renovate the center. And finally, when that renovation is complete, we're getting close. We thought about one more phase to complete this renovation which is mostly demolition and some renovation space which could be done over the summer. Sorry, Mike. So first, I just wanna say, I don't know if we have the point in it, but I really appreciate the color coding and how you showed the renovation because conceptually, it makes sense because it's only made fun of the fields so I really appreciate that. So my question is, how much of a good, you referenced this in some of these, how much of the construction would it be environmentally possible to do while students are in the building and how much of this is happening in the summer? Not, I don't need, like I'm not looking you to go option by option and phase by phase, but just in general, what's the kind of guiding principle of how you would do this work, you know, what are we having off hours or what work is permissible, really. Yeah, exactly, most students are live in there, yeah. Well, I suppose every community has a different tolerance for that. We have done construction projects where construction is happening, for example, in this blue area while students are in session in the classroom. So, and that is what we're thinking about here. So now what construction activities are happening in there? It's mostly interior renovation and systems. There is exterior wall work required around the courtyard. There would be, so I don't know, I guess I'm getting into the weeds a little bit, but that is what we're thinking about, that it is complex and it is complex. And it has to be some trade-offs between what activities can go on at certain times and that affects the length of time. Yeah, go ahead. For example, there's some activities you really want to arrange your schedule around the summers, hazardous materials abatement, right? It's possible to be done while schools in session over weekends, but it's an enormous hassle and generally communities frown on it, even if it's possible. So you have to kind of sometimes go into areas where you may not be working until after Christmas break, you might have to go into the summer to take down ceilings to do some abatement. And then the question is, do we put temporary ceilings back in or do we leave it open so it kind of looks a little shabby? So those are, that's the kind of fine-grained stuff. Early on, Jesse said we used the CM as sort of the baseline. It's kind of looking at those sort of options because that's the kind of thing that construction manager can really drill down and working with the administration on what's our tolerance. And then even once you have a plan, you're gonna get into there and there's gonna be a guy shooting studs into the slab and it's going bang, bang. And meanwhile, the teacher's testing going out. You gotta stop. So everything stops and we gotta rework our plan and come back tonight after school's out and catch up. So that's where, again, a construction manager's very helpful because they can work with you to deal with that whereas a general contractor will be less cooperative than that scenario. That's really helpful. That's a level of detail, so thank you. Good enough for now. And I was thinking all these plans are looking at the 420 school because the reason we can shift people around is because we're not at full capacity. We do have extra swing space, so these phasings really wouldn't apply to the three, our lower school population. These are planning for a 465 school at the end of the day. The pre-K program hasn't begun yet. So that space is already in the spring space. Right. If you're talking about to get to a 315, we have to think about that a little more. It seems like in general you have space in that case because you have fewer students, but no, I guess... But then in the end, you don't have that much square footage because right now you're taking the existing population, growing it for whatever, but if you're at the existing and targeting existing, you don't really have swing space, so then you get into... The addition's become smaller and so you don't get as much swing space, and that's enough. So these apply to the large school population. These aren't the bigger ones. Yeah, yeah, good point. There would be ways to phase it, but they would be different than this. Yeah, and they may involve temporary classrooms, so we'll start to see as we go further. But B and C, because we have pretty good size additions, it expands the overall square footage from the outset and allows us to avoid temporary classrooms. D does its well. We're building the pre-K and the gym addition. And the first 12 months. And then in that summer, the first and second summer, probably, we're renovating the classrooms in that quarter. Okay, and then for the next school year, we're needing to renovate the interior and build that courtyard we're bringing daylight. And that involves a bunch of rooms. We listed the rooms that are taken there, which are under construction, and then we proposed where they might go. So I won't go through every room, but I'll just say we were thinking of temporarily using the gym for a media center and book storage, probably the math rooms and a small conference room, which were taken by construction. And then using the new pre-K wing, which doesn't have pre-K students yet, for two general classrooms, which are missing three special education rooms, one ELL room, one OT room and one speech room. And so that's how we thought we could fit it all within the existing footprint for that year while the interior would be renovated. And then that interior would come online, and we would need to renovate in the summer the cafeteria and kitchen and the areas in blue, the main central spaces in the building. And then also complete the gym. And then we have another five month period where we're renovating what used to be the administration. Now the administration is able to move to their new space right in front of the door. And so we have to find a space for the rooms that are currently in that blue area where we're still renovating. So we have the pre-K wing being used for kindergarten space. We have a temporary computer lab because that space is being built. And then we have the temporary music room. And that's not too long, it's about five months. And then finally, 36 months in or we're done. And that's gonna feel very much the same as option E. The difference in option E is we don't have a gym addition. So there's less swing space to begin with. So we build the pre-K wing, it takes about 12 months. We renovate in the summer as much as we can in that U-shape. But then when we go to renovate that interior area, we just don't have enough space. So we need to bring in some temporary classrooms. And so we have them for the media center, the book storage, the map, and the small conference room. We didn't actually have to put general classrooms into the temporary classrooms. And similar to option D, then we're finishing up the central spaces, the cafeteria, kitchen. And then we go to the summer. And then we're renovating the administration and the kindergarten area. So we need a temporary band and orchestra and a temporary music room. And we have temporary kindergarten back in the pre-K wing, which is similar to option D. Finally, the administration suite is done and we can wrap up the accommodation when that last blue area is renovated. We can move music and band into that space and art. So we had about 36 months for that one as well. So I made it through. Yeah. In some ways, it might make sense to start with questions on the last piece first. Just because they were there. I don't know, do folks have, do they generally make sense? I have lots of questions, but I'd like to start with something that I have been trying to explain to people, I feel like I don't have a handle on it. That is, we have options A through F. For the reno options, there's part that's new and part that's reno. We know that the new construction, the empty plant at the net zero, my law has to be, net zero has no fossil fuels. The reno portion of that could continue to use the gas boiler. And my question is, with all of these options, I heard an answer. I think I know the answer to this question is it isn't using the gas boiler, but I'd just like to understand what of existing systems would continue to be used? What is the energy source for heating, cooling, and electricity in the renovation portions of options B through E? So, let's see, which one do we start? With option B, we're not saving the boiler room due to the way the fill layout works. As for what can be reused in the rest of the mechanical and plumbing distribution system to reach the classroom, if you remember, we talked about the classrooms having unit ventilators, which are providing heating and cooling. Those, we said, have to go. Those are just not meeting the acoustic standards. They're breaking down as it is, and I think it's bad. So that means we're going to need to provide heat and cool to the classrooms. Our base schemes are on the VAB system. So, that's, let's see, that would be a electric, actually, sure. I might have to get this together if I'm going to be able to answer that. When we're using the boiler, we are in option E and D we're feeding our systems from hot water provided by the boiler for perimeter heat. So, I suppose it would be the same in option B for a renovation area. We would have the same gas-fired boiler. When I was reading the, and I guess I got kind of marrying Maria's, well, I'm not sure that can't. My reading of the narrative suggested that because it was basically little value except for the reasonably new boilers to all the rest of the distribution systems, it was all effectively new. And so my interpretation of that was that really we're probably coming up, my assumption was after reading that, was we're giving up the boilers for really all the schemes and we're providing some new input. And I guess I may be wrongly intuited that it was basically an electrical, that we were using the same systems everywhere and we were only offsetting with the PB, the new areas. So therefore it would be electrical. Electricity would be aerating cool. And maybe that was, the new areas would need to be electrical. I guess you'd have an option in the renovation areas whether we go for an electric boiler or gas boiler. So in some of the options, we are assuming the boiler room stays and we're able to reuse those gas boilers as they are. For the rest when we're doing a new mechanical room, we could go either way, I guess. I'm not sure what's the point, where are we going? I think we just want to know what we're using. Yeah, I want to be able to say, okay, so in option C where it's 71% renovation, the gas boilers are not that old, they're not advocating for fossil fuel use, I would love to see it go away. But I just need to explain to people, like we are or are not using the gas boilers. We are using, we are basically, and if we're not, why are we not? And what's the cost? What's the cost benefit in other ways? And then to say, I understand based on the PB that we're not, that the renovation portions are not net zero because we'd be using the grid to get electricity, but by not using the gas, if we're not using the gas boilers and we're actually exceeding the net zero bylaws requirements to, because it doesn't say you have to get rid of your fossil fuel for renovation, but if we are doing that, I think we need to explain that and say, we're doing this and this is why we're doing it and this is why we think it's a good idea. It just has to be made clear because I can't answer the question about the boilers. Okay, I understand. Oh, it's kind of in the same vein as far as less to do with like the heating system but the general, there's no arc, there I didn't see any architectural narrative that went along with the cost. So it's like one, like, do we ever talk about like what we're targeting for insulation values of water, I just missed it. Yeah, no, we don't get into solution values. We've communicated with our mechanical, go ahead. Yeah, just like in general, like how are we treating the renovation portion as far as like we have this slab that's there and I'm assuming it's, that we aren't jacking around the whole thing up. You know, yeah. And I guess it kind of gets into like the narrative for the lead scorecard and in general, like it would be helpful with the lead scorecard also follow the same options that we have laid out because it's confusing to me how like we're targeting the same, like in the energy and atmosphere credits that optimize energy performance. We're saying that we can target the same number of energy performance in almost entirely renovation project that we can in a new construction project and I'm skeptical that we can actually achieve that. And I guess that's where if I had read the architectural narrative, I might have got a better understanding of how on the lead scorecard we feel like we can get to the same energy performance out of a renovation project that we can in a totally new construction. Yeah, it did. Yeah, I think the lead point system gives us some benefit from using the existing building when it comes to energy performance. So you're comparing against a baseline which is less high performance. So I think that's part of why that's happening there. So we don't mean to say in those scorecards that a renovation project is going to be as energy efficient as a new building, that's first. I think you alluded to that earlier. So I think you had said something about it, the Bestie UI might be 65 for the renovation. Which kind of intuitively makes sense because you're not replacing all those systems. And I'll check to your question, but I think we're using gas boilers in the renovation areas right now. And if you tell us we needed to go non-fossil fuel, we could look at it that way, I suppose. But I think the reason to use gas is it's very efficient and cross effective, like, sorry. Yeah, so it's sort of related. So this slide we spent quite a bit of time on in the net zero. I had two thoughts that I wanted to share and I believe about the transition in this project. So one is that I just think a similar model could be developed for being through E because I don't want anyone walking away feeling like the net zero by-law is not being followed. Granted, I'll be at a smaller scale because of the different percent of new. And I'm at the same cost cases because I don't want, one thing that I think would be helpful for the community to see is that the same commitment towards anything new being net zero is present and that there's a range of net zero possibilities. I think the second thing I wanted to say is I imagine, and I'm not trying to suggest that you should do this, but I imagine there's someplace between 50 and 30. Like if you did the envelope work but not the change the age back system. So I just think it'd be important for people to realize that it's not like there's two slots, 50 and 30, that you can lock into. Right, they're fair there. And then the thing- Great numbers, yeah. Yeah, and I think the last thing is the challenge and perhaps this is something, I don't have a strong opinion, but the way I conceptualize the conversation or reflect in the conversation earlier is what do we want to make the base, right? So right now the base cost has an EUI, sorry, says my language, of 50. And then we look at it as an add-on and is there a way to present a range of options so that we can get feedback? It may appear to someone that the committee is favoring an EUI of 50. Right, we're not trying very hard. Right, and or we're being like, people could come to other conclusions about that, that its cost is more important. And maybe those are true, but they're not. I don't feel like there's a consensus on the committee on those topics, so. Maria? I think what might help clarify all these kind of nitty gritty and comparison things. You know, we came up with the list of non-negotiable items for the design, right? Everything's gonna have daylight, everything's gonna be acoustic, all that. Could we maybe come up with the list so people understood like all of the options, these are the non-negotiable energy, and what is our baseline? If you have non-negotiables that we need to roll into this that haven't been previously identified. I think we haven't talked about it in this level of detail. I think we have talked about it in this level of detail. Yeah, and I think that it would be helpful, you talked about comparing what the different options would look like on that slide that had you, this is the green entry, this is the edit, with the different UIs to plug in our letter options so we can correlate that. And to talk about what are the R value? What are we talking about, for instance? This is a kind of a geeky community, right? We don't have a lot of data. So I think that it'll help us to compare and to put what you're proposing into perspective. Yeah, so a couple of things. One, I don't think, I don't think, I mean, we may be able to come up with things that are non-negotiable, right, energy, but other than compliance with the viola, but I'm not sure that's really what I'm looking for in terms of a report, so much as really good clarity about the information and sort of the menu and implications of different options and choices that the community's been presented with and real clarity about that. I do think that we should have, we should choose our base case wisely. In my view, the base case should be probably a more aggressive energy efficiency around the building envelope because I think, at least the sort of the gestalt of the effort of the town in promoting a zero energy building was to try to push our practice in our town, our lived practice around building efficiency and sustainability, not just purely netting out the energy. So I think, and also I think it's better to argue from that point, even if the number was a little larger, I'd rather argue from that point than act like we're treating, I think Mike said it right, acting like we're treating the effort to increase the efficiency of the building systems or envelope, like it's an extra add-on. If you want this, you have to pay more for it. I don't think that really matches the spirit of the enterprise of the work that we're trying to do, regardless a little of the town, ends up arguing, when people get the report, they argue over the expense a little bit when I do it. What goes with that though, to me, is that, forgive me if it's, again, I mean, I said earlier, if it's in the narrative, I apologize, but I think we need to be really up front and transparent in reporting what the different options look like from an energy use and energy efficiency standpoint, as well as anything else you're assuming around rainwater or something like that. Why? Because I just, if you're building in a set of assumptions that our factor of the rehab portions of the building are somehow substantially different than what they are in the new portions of the building, I just want to know it, and I want people when they're looking at the different options to just know what that is, same thing around the whatever's powering the systems, and then if there are any, and then I guess the other point I'd make is, is if similar to this business of getting to a higher energy efficiency for the new construction, if there's a similar story you would tell around the rehab, we are making this assumption around how much we are pushing the efficiency of the existing building, but you know, actually we could have done more, but we didn't build that in, but here's what it would cost to do X and Y, it used to none of that. Does it make sense or does that ask you to do a whole other report and that's too much work? Well, not necessarily, but that was the goal of the slide that shows the two EUIs, right, that this is where we are and we could do more and we're trying to get feedback as to what you want the report to say, and then we could switch the baseline and then we could look back and say, well, we could do less and that's already done and we could look at potentially doing more. The only reason I'm looking for one more information on that, I guess the unstated thought I had was from probably helps having members of the audience here who are very passionate about this to put it top of mind, which is a good thing, is sort of a running assumption has been if the pollution of the building isn't required to be zero energy, then it won't be zero energy. And so I could easily see somebody in town saying, well, this is a feasibility study, I wanna know what the feasibility of different options are, why didn't you look into or could you look into whether some of the options where there's rehab could be zero energy and what it would cost to do that. Now that may be, you might tell me, no, no, you don't understand for 10 really good reasons as they got to say the crazy thing to say. And that doesn't bother. Well, no, but I'm saying, but then list the 10 reasons so that we can share them with the public. Because I'm just saying that I think that for some people coming and walking in the door and seeing a range of options and saying, I get they're all compliant with the bylaw, but I'm also seeing that the adherence to the bylaw is like really wrote and explicit, meaning if I don't have to reach zero energy, I'm not trying to, that the response back is gonna be, well, did you look into what it would cost to either A, make it zero energy for the entire building, or B, if not, push the level of efficiency up to a reasonably high, or reasonably highest level you could in the areas that are being rehabbed. And I wanna know what the answer to that is. Well, I think we could address rehab similarly as we did in the construction. I think that's what you're saying, in that we looked at rehab would conventionally have a EUI, which is this, and we need to be offset by all the solar panels, it's gonna be quite a lot. It might not fit on the site anymore or whatever. And then we could look at, well, there are things we could do and a renovation that would really drop the EUI, may not be as much as new construction, we could drop it probably more there still, but that would have fewer solar panels, might be feasible. And then you'd have the cost for those additional solar panels and that additional work to the rehab, which would be more than you've estimated here. I guess we could do something like that. So I sense a couple hands. I know Mike, you have the lead, Ray, is it okay if you guess we should look at it? Let me read from what I got, thank you. So I'm gonna put it just a finer point. So whatever this page ends up looking like based on the feedback, I think it'd be good to have this page for all the options, right? Cause some of it's about the conversations we're having. I'm going back to Heather's comment earlier about the site and how many PVs are on the site, fall field, and that's gonna look presumably different than the renovation options, because in any of these schemes, you're gonna need fewer PVs if you're, I'm guessing, just as a percentage. So I think just that way it shows that there's no favoring one option versus another and that people get a better sense of what it would actually look like on the site given the different levels of newness and renovation. So I think even if some of them are so close, like D&E may not look much different, but I think it then gives, we're getting equal attention to all the different options. You could actually factor in the answer you're giving to my question and to his request because the lower right hand side boxes didn't have information on if there was some sort of additional level of investment that he put in, you could write it in, all right? I think so. It's actually. It's possible. Go to Irina and then I'm gonna kind of wonder if we want to move on to other areas of question because I'm sure there are, so. So I have a question for Mike. Who owns the fields? Is it school property or symptom property? It's not like the reason there's not a particular distinction between town and school. Yeah, and the town owns all the property. Okay, that's part of the question. So one comment I wanted to make is, look at the gravity, and I don't remember seeing about it later, but I didn't find it, but I looked and I couldn't find anything related to borders or business. So I think my assumption seems to me that it was not mentioned inside the investigation. Well, the floor plans keep the boiler room where it is in two options. Yeah, but there's no, in the narrative, there was no anywhere mentioned about. So you're concerned that the estimator may have considered additional boilers, new boilers? Either new boilers, either new boilers or what type of boilers or what's the difference between what they consider. And then the other suggestion was, I think the committee should decide, we have too many things, if we stand out in another layer with UIs, wondering whether everybody would be agreeing to do a week on it for the 465. So we have one benchmark where we have the death of the different UIs only for the 465. Yeah, I think that makes sense, because we also do the phasing only for that. Yeah. So this is good information to have, but I think if you're gonna increase the UI, I think that has to be nice and don't have 300 options. Not only is a lot of work for you, but it's a little much for the community to process it for us to process it. I mean, even it's hard for us to process this much. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm glad to know. If you have a separate chart to be in the UIs. And it might be one of those things where there's gonna be a certain level of information in the body of the final report, and then there's gonna be other information that you wanna take deeper, maybe as kind of an addendum, not appendix. So we would still have information on this analysis for multiple options, multiple sizes. You're saying for illustrative purposes, the illustration would be the course of the vote. I think so. And the different calculation of costs on the UI, different UIs, only for the 465. So we wouldn't do that for the, that's what the superintendent was asking for. But that diagram that I'm gonna do overall, the letters is related to the 465 option. And the site plan would also then just be for the, you know, do a site plan for every one of those options. And then an explanatory text, you talked about the costs going above and beyond with the existing building, if you wanna try that. Once we have the numbers for the others, I'm just trying to make sure I know what decisions we're just making. Because what I don't wanna do is accidentally get in a situation where we decided not to have numbers and analysis for a non-preca option. So I think that's a mistake. If as long as it's in there somewhere, that people can get it and they can find it, then illustrating one straight through is fine. If we don't have the non-preca option, then it has the facing becomes completely different. Because they are using the screen space of the preca as the screen space. So then you have to start doing a whole new analysis about facing and costs. Because the preca is being used in most options, except A and B, the preca is being used for swing space. So then you need to repeat everything, the whole analysis with non-preca. Well, I think that gets back to Jesse's comment earlier where the 465 is the one that's the most detailed and a lot of the other cost information is extrapolated up and down from there. And what we're talking about when it comes to varying the envelope again would probably be some level of extrapolation, but there's a somewhat parallel of somewhat separate discussion about the slide that kind of talks about the primary, the A, B, C, D, E. And a lot of that is most, so far as most even focused on the on again that 465 model. And that when we start shrinking the building, there would be other impacts. And I guess I'm looking at Eric wondering, have we, what level of granularity do we need in the graphics to talk about that task where we are? Do you feel like, are we losing something? But you feel we want to make sure we hit. I just want to make sure in the end when people look at this that it doesn't look like we did a real analysis of option, the 465 option. And then we did some sketches of the others. And so that when someone looks at it, they say, the 465 analysis seems real and thorough to me, but for the other ones they're really indicative as opposed to really analytically strong. And so if you're telling me that's not true and that they are analytically strong and you could rely upon them. And presumably it has some illustrations of what they look like, is you've been showing them, all right, about some basic senses of what they look like. I think that would be helpful. There's 147 options on that matrix. No, no, I don't think we're not planning to document those. All at the same level, as you know. And I don't think that's what you're suggesting, but I do need to be careful of what I'm agreeing to do. Honestly, I just, honestly, I guess otherwise what would be useful to me would be to indicate what the difference between a 465 and, what is it, 420? Or a most numbers 450, I threw those in 350. I don't know what I'm talking about. Oh, okay, sorry. I'm saying if you take pre-K out. Oh, right. This has been a source of argument all fall. Have you forgotten already? Again, I'm carrying water for the school committee that I want to make sure that the end report fairly shows what a, with pre-K and a non pre-K option look like. And if it seems like it's a bias against a little bit of a robust information for the non pre-K option, I'm here arguing against doing that. On the other hand, I don't care if it's only focused on the 420 and 465 options and the rest of them are weaker. I don't care about that. So I think what I'm hearing is that if the 420 has an impact phasing-wise, it should get, and so it may not, but I think what I'm hearing is a request for you to go away and think about that and report back in some way, right? I thought we had, we had this discussion about pre-K and non pre-K and I think we had agreed that the task that we were looking was with pre-K. So I don't mind having more emphasis having the pre-K and not having the pre-K in secondary because that was what we discussed that we had agreed upon. So if it's gonna be another layer of complications, I don't mind having a student without pre-K because I think that's what the task that we were for this committee was to pass a school pre-K through six. The architects were nice enough that they're including the option without pre-K but we originally started with pre-K. So if that is gonna take time of doing some other analysis, I would prefer to go within that with pre-K because that was what we decided. I think it's a question of how far you have to go to be credible. So we've done an analysis of with and without pre-K for each of the six options. You make a good point that the phasing, the construction duration may need to be adjusted as pre-K falls out because we lose some swing space but I think the amount that that's gonna change the overall project budget is probably not that big. And so if your goal is order of magnitude numbers, I think you have useful information but there's always gonna be a point because we're not gonna delve into all of the details that are being thrown at us tonight. We're not gonna have the answer to those details without designing further into a building. And I think that's, you're gonna have to, at the end of this, look at these numbers with a sense of tolerance that there's going to be a range that these numbers can't get into. I mean, under a million dollars right now, we're talking years away from the project. It's just feeling like a fine grain, I'll be honest. So I think we should try to focus on the big stuff. Along those lines. I think we need to get to some of the other numbers here if we're good to move on from here. All right, so can we look at this one? Yeah, yeah. It's basically the summary where we can talk about a lot of things. So the design contingency here is given as 12%. The escalation is 8%. General requirements and the general conditions is 137.500. So looking at recent MSBA projects, those percentages are higher. The design contingency has been listed at 10%, for example, construction contingency at two and a half. But the escalation of 8% seems very generous. I mean, I would just like to have some explanation there because what happens is that when you come down to these numbers, when you get to construction costs per square foot, option just for simplicity, just looking at A, coming in at 552 seems high. And I would like you to get a little bit more into that and get an explanation there because if you look at 2019 MSBA projects, I mean, the average construction cost per square foot is in the more newer of 470. So it seems generous. So I'd like us to talk about that. I'd also like to talk about the other, the soft cost of 30%. Because again, that seems generous. And if this is, I mean, if the idea here is like, this is, these are extremely conservative numbers and we're going big because we don't wanna come in with something lower and then go up later, I think we need to say that. But otherwise, all of those percentages make a difference. And for example, the soft cost in the past in the last year at MSBA was 25%. So the average. So that one, I think we went big soft cost. So we can look at that. And I think we would tailor down to 25, we could be 20 as low as 20. And we could think about that a little bit more relative to the general understanding of the needs of this project. And that will make a big impact as you know, this is a big number changer. So that's a good point. I don't think these are conservative in that way. I think that one was, that was ours as opposed to our underestimates for one. And I think I can explain these if that would help. Yes. So let's start with design contingency. The first one you mentioned, 12%. The way design contingency works is as you approach bid, as your documents continue to develop and you know more and more about the project and it's better to find, you ratchet down the design contingency. And what it's reflecting is the fact that we don't really know where this project is going 100% at this point. And there's scope out there that hasn't been defined yet. It can't be estimated properly. And so that's sort of an industry standard way things are done. So depending on what phase estimate you look at, you could see less and less design contingency. So that may be why you see a difference, a 2% difference is also where we've got 147 options. So how far could we go in terms of documenting them out in terms of all of those pertinent details? So it may be a little bit higher partly because we're in feasibility as opposed to a schematic design or even the PSR in the MTA process, it could be a little lower. Yeah, I mean if you look at a schematic design, all the exterior elevations would be documented so the windows would be accurately taken off. I mean there'd be real quantities associated with everything in the estimate. Now there's a lot of assumptions based on standards and the lives of our floor plans and that helps. But so because we're not at SD level, there's more unknown. So we have a bigger factor of safety and the... Yeah, I think the point is we need to say that now and not just say like this is a locked in numbers. It's to say because we're early and these other reasons and it's likely to do something different in the future. I mean, those are the kind of things because people see numbers on page and then it's God's honest truth, right? So I think we need to be cognizant of that. Okay, construction contingency whether it's two and a half or 3% is a pretty industry standard numbers. We might know 3% in this case and I guess I don't have a great progression now as to why one person can be the other. I could check with the estimator. But escalation, what we've represented there is 4% per year, which is we're looking two years in advance so that's why it's 8% total. And 4% is what we've seen in recent estimates. Actually, we were talking about our most recent estimates are actually trending up right now beyond that because there's concerns about tariffs and inflation. And so escalation is a guess about how much prices will increase over the next two years. Yeah, I just wanted to actually say what it is. Is this working? Yeah, I don't think it's working. So what are the uncertainties? I mean, you know, Alison just mentioned the real tariffs in my left ear. But I think people need to hear what's creating those numbers. So we may have not been enough conservative here considering our duration could be further out and tariffs and other. But the counter argument is we're eventually gonna have a recession. Yeah. And this number will actually go up. The other way for a budget is kind of under budget. Right. Just as a kind of a general principle, the way you deal with uncertainty is with money. Yeah. And we're very early in the process. So there's a lot of uncertainty. So there's a lot of money set aside for the things we don't know that we don't know. As we know more, some of that money can go away. But as you pointed out, you don't wanna come in really optimistic and find out the realities you ended up money and then it's a complete disaster. It's much better to go and say, we assumed a lot of horrible things. They didn't happen. So we're in a good place and we're able to return money or it's not gonna cost what we thought. And that's how those, you know, in concept have a number to change. I wanted to also address, I do it. Okay, go ahead. Oh, I was going to say design contingency, these numbers aren't just because, you know, they are based on historic evidence of when a cost estimator designs, makes a cost estimate at a feasibility phase. And then they follow that project through until it gets to bid. And then they say, well, I was off by 12%. And he goes, I was off by 12% a hundred times. So actually if they're at 12% in, so these numbers are based on cost estimators tracking their own ability to cost estimate at a feasibility phase and then the design. So these numbers are very in the process. And the other thing that's trying to be kind of explored across the range is that if we were looking at these as totally separate projects, a renovation, an addition in renovation and a new building, that design contingency at this phase would be different because a new building has a lot less uncertainty than a total renovation and something in between is something in between. And so he's attempting, and I'm putting words in your mouth and you can tell me to shut up if you want, but he's attempting to across the board do a decent job of being conservative. Trying to find a middle ground between the word for everyone. That's because we wanted to sort of be apples down. So it's listed as 12% for all the options. I believe that's the case. But that's not as you light on something and get further down the path. Right, so if we were a new building, it might be five. And if we were a total renovation, it might be 20. I'm kind of making numbers up to give some extremity to the range. So I have to go. But I did have a comment, and now I'm forgetting it. I'll remember it once I put my jacket on. Sorry. Are we still forwarding? Yeah, we're still forwarding. My thoughts about the overall cost per square foot. Yes. Because she mentioned MSPA cost per square foot is 4.75% or what? It's 4.71% of the year. Okay. So escalation would be one reason we're higher. 8% is going to be a big chunk of that increase just because we're escalating out further than the MSPA projects that you're looking at. Well, no, those are starts. Those are starting. That was 2019. The other thing I would point out is our site cost is substantial on this site. We have a big site. MSPA will reimburse up to a certain percentage of Ruth 8%. And we're way over that here, 20 something percent for site costs, if I remember correctly. And so that's something we could look at. What should our scope be in the site? Did we want to do all the fields? Right now, the site scope is itemized in the estimate. And we can go through that if we want to. That was my question. So I think I know the answer to the question, but I want to make sure. So I'm assuming in the cost estimates that require the longer phasing, that that includes all the costs associated with every month that a project goes longer than it is going. So all the general conditions, all that's in there. I just want to make sure. It's a very construction. Yeah. And then we have the portables for that one option. And we have an estimate for portables. But it doesn't include anything that the school district would have to pay that move books twice, move books twice, move classrooms twice, and all that kind of stuff. The moving cost would be in South Cross. Yeah, exactly. We have this big South Cross number now, so I could say, oh, we included it. We're trying to find that now. But the more moving around, yeah, that's going to cost a lot. And the staff cost wouldn't be in our project too. Exactly. Exactly. That would be part of the operations. Great. Thank you. So now we're down to just a bare forum. I'm going to ask for a question. And then I'm going to ask the group who the next one to leave is to engage. How much time we have left for questions before we run out? So I have questions about the site cost. Because I think as you go down on the options, it starts to become a bigger, bigger percentage of the whole construction cost. And it's almost the same number, even though it's very difficult to work in the new building. Yes, you have to up to everything at the end, because you're moving the kids from side to side. It's required. Yeah. And in the other ones, where they're most on the same footprint, it should not be the same cost, because we are most in the same footprint. Unless we go with your term, then we have to figure out what the confidence and we do them again. You bring up a good point. So in some of the D and E, which are primarily the same footprint, the fields stay where they are. Do you want to redo the fields? And there are some drainage issues with the fields now. But I'm not sure that means that you want to include that scope in the study. That's part of the question, and I think the committee has to decide how much we do for comparison. But I think it's considering that in D and E, even if it's a bigger proportion, I don't have the numbers here. But I think it adds to 20% of the whole project cost. Right, because that same site number holds in the rest of the project cost than us. It may or may not be the right comparison. It sounds like something we should probably set as a conversation for our next meeting is to actually look at that scope. Because even in all of them, they have the site prep. It's almost a million dollars in all of them. We have three million numbers in site development. And I think none of the projects have the same cost. I think there's a high difference. Yeah, I agree. I think right now, the estimator is looking at doing the whole site. So the area of the whole site is staying the same between all the options. Now, within there, you'll see they might or might feel the area is differently to a certain extent as the options show it differently. That's within its noise level. Within the whole options, I think there are 200,000 dollars different. On the site development, we are seeing the first part is almost the same. And I think the scope of work. We're doing the whole site and all the options right now. And I'm not sure that's right. And that's why I'm asking you. How important is it to redo the fields? Well, I think there's a different question, too. Is what portion of the fields are or are the non-school building, I guess, parking lot, is associated with direct school use? And what is associated with general recreational use? And I can't imagine not including all of the playground, outdoor, recreation, gardens, space associated with the educational program of the building. But I don't actually think we should be freighting these estimates with redoing an adult recreational softball field with lights. Because why on Earth would you include that as the host of an all-in-one response? The town might choose to do it, but it would not. But the town can choose to do it, but the town didn't. So we're not going to include it. But also, it's just not, that's a different portion of the town budget that would pay for them. The capital plan would pay for that. And so I think that's important. I'm sure you're going to do this, but I just think that reinforcing what Maria said earlier about documenting your assumptions, the way you explain it, I think 8% sounds perfectly reasonable. I also think you've got to pick a fixed point in time. Because hypothetically, this building, Michael Bloomberg gave a gift to the town. We could build it next year. If not, it could be seven years from now. But then the point is, if you started inflating a hypothetical building, build seven years from now, your numbers would be worthless, basically, at that point. Because the numbers of assumptions that'd be going into it would render the exercise useless. So it needs to be something close enough in time so that the numbers are still meaningful when the assumptions are still meaningful, far enough away that it starts feeling realistic, like let's say it's two years from now for the same argument, which I think what you did. So I think that makes sense. Documenting that makes sense, and again, I guess I'm still looking for your team's best professional judgment on things like soft costs. When you tell me it could be 20% or it could be 30%, that's not a great answer to me. Because that's such a huge difference, right? I mean, it's a massive difference. 20% and 30% is like completely massive. So just millions of dollars in this company. So just getting more precision around whether you say it. And by the way, also, the key point is we're not looking for a low number. We're looking for the right number. So if you can justify 30, then use 30. If you're saying 25 really is a better percentage, then use 25. But I still think having some sort of baseline or some sort of comparable footnote that says, if you look in the industry, you'll see this and this, we use this for that reason. I think it's just extremely helpful, not just for us as a committee, but also again for the end audience. Because one of the things which is challenging about this process is no matter what you do in a company like this, the numbers look big, right? And so people just need to understand where the numbers come from and have a good sense of what it's based on. And you know, I think that's sort of it. Yeah, we intend to justify our soft cross. We'll be done. So we are at, playing on the time period, we're at 10 after seven. I wanna have as full of discussions we can have while maintaining forum. What are we gonna kick the tires on this thing next? What do we need to get done? Well, that's kind of, it was my next breath. We're probably not gonna meet again until I'm gonna be conservative here and say, the first of the second week of January, depending on what week we get forum, I know you're not available tonight, but. So we're. But I said this a little, every other time. I know. Are we trying next week, no? I just don't think we're gonna make it next week. But we can try. We can do a little poll or where you can help us with a poll. But assuming that we can't manage to pull something off for next week, it's likely to be that first week of January. And to recircles back to my question, I have towards the beginning was, what more do we need to give you in the way of feedback while also answering folks questions? Well, I mean, I speak to Jesse, who's done the most work here, but. I mean, this is all been very helpful. We've seen where we have some holes that we need more explain for our task or graphics. And so we have stuff to continue to work on. And I think maybe, you know, it's another session similar to this where we continue to go through and we'll continue to probe and see areas that don't make sense or that need more explanation. I mean, it's not gonna be, there's no clear answer like I need you to say this. And I think this has been just very helpful for us. By the way, is there a technical, and now I'm asking our recording technician, technical limit to how long this is gonna record? Okay. 17 more minutes. 17 more minutes. 70, 70. Oh, 70, oh, more is keep talking. We'll never possibly do this. I got it. Okay. Or yeah. I think we want to get a little more detail on the cost estimates. I mean, this is our first pass at it. And I think we do need to take a little deeper. I actually, I want to come back to the cost per square foot because I'm just not, it's significantly higher than what I'm comfortable with. So I think we just need to make sure we're including what we should be and not including what we shouldn't. And I think that we need to think about are there things that we can be think about doing different in the design to affect our costs? Are there choices that we should be thinking about making to affect our costs because it's a big ticket item? You know, I think we have to talk about the elephant in the room and see what we can do. Yeah, I mean, I think for a feasibility study, it's just that, is it our various options feasible? So option A, new school, well, there's an infinite number of new schools we can do. And every one of them will have a different price point. And I don't know that there's any value in just doing variations of new schools to see that. Yeah, they can cost anywhere from X to X. And the same thing with these renovation options, we sort of zeroed in on the obvious sort of conceptual options of building a vision here. There's a million ways those rooms can be reconfigured and how it could be phased and they'll, and so I don't know that that exercised. You're just gonna get another number that's no more valid than the other number. And so how do you pick one of the other? I think if I could pick up a little bit on what Maria is thinking and what I just kind of got my head around around the site, are there scope pieces? I don't want to, I don't think this is Maria's intent. I don't want to debate the cost of the ceiling tile, you know, or whether we should use it but that's more expensive one. That's not a valuable exercise. Definitely fine grain. But if we are including larger amounts of site costs, which are gonna drive up those square footages, then we should be conceptually versus doing what we could just do around the educational program. That's something I think we want to identify and at least talk about. Maybe that's the only one there is but if there are other ones we should be thinking about, I think we want to spend a little time to do that. I mean, I think we just have to, you know, maybe this 550 is the number but I think we need to be able to explain what are we getting for 550 that the folks who did it for 505 aren't getting? You know, that's the kind of question I think we have to answer. Sure. Yeah, and I think we can kind of go exactly, benchmark sort of by division, you know, how are our HVC numbers compared to other HGI? Are they higher or why are they higher? You know, and look at kind of the major pieces of the costs and check them against other schools we've done and our estimators will look at it and look at that delta and come up with an explanation so that we can come back and say, hey, so you are, as we've already identified. So site costs are very high. So that's one that's jumped out. But are there other items like that and then we can talk about why they're different and why they're causing the cost to be a little bit higher and maybe we can adjust the scope or we understand why and we'll go with it. Eric. To me, that's actually exactly the exercise is because I don't, especially if you, I guess this isn't included in the soft cost but it is included in these escalator costs and things like that. I guess my point is I don't, until we walk through sort of how these costs are composited and how benchmarking them in some way, then I wouldn't know how to even offer any feedback. I mean, we sort of, I mean, I already asked a good question but otherwise we sort of accidentally backed into the question of what are we doing on the site and what's the scope of that work which is a useful exercise. I don't think we're gonna get anything useful on this without going through the same sort of exercise. And then I think, I think, I wouldn't want to get too far into the leads of it but I think where you're identifying things that might be, if there is anything, that might be unusually expensive. So in other words, you might say, you'd say this other school over here that has a total square foot cost, you'd think it's apples and apples but actually if you break it down and you look at this segment and this segment as we were looking at it, in fact, actually the work that needs to be done turns out as substantially different. It affects the cost and here's the reason why. I think not only is it useful for us but I think it's useful for sort of the narrative of, because it actually goes back to feasibility. We've discovered this thing about this building site or this building program and here's what it looks like. Question, we talked about changing the baseline to be the 30 EUI building. When you think about benchmarking, that will be another thing we'll have to adjust out of the number and maybe that's just how we approach it. Whereas if we stick with the 50 EUI, it's gonna more easily benchmark because you're gonna find, I think, more 50 EUIs that we have information on but I could be wrong, we could look at that as well. So two things, on the site cost, I think it's very important, I was just doing the numbers. If you look at the site cost and you put all the contingencies, for option A is equivalent to $89 per square foot of the construction cost and for option A3 is $108 per square foot of the construction cost. So those are, I know that we cannot say, okay, we don't have any site cost numbers, but it accounts for a huge portion of the construction cost and as you reduce the floor print, it escalates even more. That is true. So I think we have to be very careful and I think we have to tighten these numbers. Often when we're benchmarking, we often take the sites out completely and just compare building because sites vary between every building, sort of irrelevant. At the same time, in one of these cases, we're gonna have to do something on the site, but maybe not everything. Yeah, well, we do what we think we need to with the site and put that in, right? And then the other question you were asking about comparing to other times, Cambridge has been building many net zero schools in the last years. Okay. I think there are three huge complexes. I think what the schools now are in net zero, the new ones are moving and I've seen huge complexes that have 160,000 square foot and 200 square foot, the new case through six and upper schools, schools, community centers, everything in the home. So that might be a way to compare numbers as well. Although it's a little bit more. We mentioned the pricing narrative, which, I don't know if the public might know what we're talking about. I don't know if it's on the website or not. I think I've got a question. I mean, we never really got a chance to go over that with you guys because we got connected in the school committee presentation. And maybe that might help to explain a lot of our questions. It just might be helpful to take some time to go through that or if you have other suggestions, but I think as much as we can de-organize things would be helpful so that people know like, okay, what does it mean to me when you say EY of 50 and 30? I don't know what that means to, I don't know if people can put that into something tangible and say, oh, I get it, you know. Yeah, no, but it won't. Because it's just like, does 50, is the insulation horrible with 50 and it's good at 30? No, it's good and, you know, so I think we need to be thinking about how to explain all of these things. Yeah, I mean, that's that one slide that talks about the EY of the buildings, right? And it tells you an average school current is like EY of under 10 and then what energy start by phone screen at zero and that at least gives some people reference that typical school in this climate EY is around under 110, you know, we're looking at 50, so better than half that. Right, but what are other net zero buildings? But you know what, when you're doing net zero, especially particularly for the 100% new construction, but for the no options as well, what are the ones in Cambridge? Are they 20 or are they 30? Where are they starting? They're probably in the 30s. I think that would help people to. Could be. I'm wondering if you have an outline yet for the actual final product of the report because I'm wondering if things like the pricing narrative are going to end up in there and kind of gives us a sense of, I don't know how, when we're reviewing it, like how much more that wants to be developed as something that's going to go public and part of it. It was a pretty lengthy document, my guess is it would go in there as an appendix. That wouldn't be the body that would be an executive summary, really. I was expecting feedback on that. Yeah, yeah. Just sports, just like, yeah, like at the end of the thing we did have the narrative about the lead stuff and I thought it would, it felt very kind of copied from Wildwood and not actually very relevant to this project and really kind of talked about it. The community wants to back away from net zero. I mean, it just kind of had some assumptions and it did seem not really, like based on our discussion tonight. It was made for this project. I think the consultant was just trying to cover all the bases. So I don't think they were suggesting to back away from net zero in any way. It was just trying to, again, cover the whole game. But, yeah, we've been following the MSBA structure for feasibility studies, the PDP. So it would include narratives that were used to achieve the budget in section three or four, depending on whether you're in the PDP or PSR. But that doesn't really matter. That's been our structure so far. If you want to take a look at MSBA, guidelines you could get a sense of that. But I would think the pricing information would be in the report, yeah. So that's another reason to kind of discuss it. Not only for just our understanding and how it feeds into the estimate, but as something that's going to end up in the final report. So we started off this portion of a meeting asking what our next things to do are and I feel like we haven't really articulated that yet. It sounds like we're just going to come back and do this again, is that? Well, I'm hearing what I've heard in the last 10 or 20 minutes is several points for next agenda and I'm going to kind of rattle them off and people can pipe in if they disagree. I think we want to go through narratives in some way just to make sure that everybody has the same general understanding of what's in it and ask questions about it. And I think that might actually engender a discussion about things like site scope. And certainly site scope is something else I'd like to put on that agenda. And then we might do a little bit more of this, but I think it might be in a little bit more focused way. I'm also going to ask, and I don't know if this is necessarily the next meeting, but at some point I think it would be really handy to have the net zero consultant come back and now that we've kind of surfaced some questions and talked a bit more, you know, he was able to kind of give us a big overview, but I think we have some more exacting questions asked at this point and speaking for myself, I'm curious what other people think, but I'm kind of thinking it might be nice to have another conversation if that's appropriate. What folks think about that? I like it. I mean, I think we also talked about, you had that one chart where it says, okay, this is the average, this is where we're at now, and it would go down to zero within this, but having a better sense of what the difference between that you'd get within that zero building on costs, all maybe other costs going out into the future, I think we need that to be fleshed out a little bit more. I think you were asking about that as well. Yeah, I have been, and I think one of the things that is a challenge and probably a challenge in this format is if we're not, if I'm not careful, speaking for myself, but it's probably too arresting me, we could pepper with you with a number of questions and a number of things that we'd like to say that may be either very hard to do or very easy to do, but don't necessarily productively result in a more effective work product. And so part of the challenge for me is that I'm not really asking some of these questions because I want to know them like next meeting come with a slide that shows me what this information is. Yeah, really more indicating something I think the final report has to include. So just for example, on that slide that goes through from 110% down to zero, among other things, if you really think the more illustrative numbers are 110 to that's current, 65%, 50%, or 55%, whatever, and then zero, and then drop out whatever else was on there, it would be interesting to me and then this goes back to what Maria was just asking, is understanding more what unpacking what each one of those, or at least the most important ones like 65% or 50% and zero, what does that mean in terms of the design, instruction, and operating costs? Would be something that I think not only would be interesting for the committee, but I think a NAN report was gonna be interesting enough because it really helps explain what's actually happening in the building, what are the implications for the, does that make sense or am I asking too much? Well, yes and yes. Okay. So maybe that's in the wrong question. In terms of operating costs, we absolutely can tell you what those mean and we started to do that, but when you say what does that mean in terms of the building? Again, these are EUIs, or just how much energy the building uses. So for any given EUI, there are literally an infinite number of ways to achieve that number. So it doesn't mean that you have triple-glace windows. I could do it with single-pane windows. It just means they have to offset a different, I mean, and that's when you get into design, we will model, you know, you do detail energy models and you keep playing and changing with the pieces and there's just an infinite number of combinations and you try and find the one that makes the most sense and get the most bang for your buck to get the lowest EUI you get. But for us to describe what a building that gives an EUI of 40 looks like, just not meaningful. Can I ask another question? Okay, that makes sense. So I look at that slide and I say to myself, I can't really picture or understand what the meaningful differences are other than they don't understand the difference between zero and 100. But what, maybe you already have it. Forgive me if that's in a Google Drive site. But understanding how in your experience and experience of your colleagues, you would describe what the meaningful difference of that range of construction alternatives is without being exhaustive. Does that make any sense? Is there a narrative way of describing how you achieve different ranges without being that specific? I think we relied on our experience to communicate with our consultants right now because we work with these team all the time. But I think we could narratively give a summary of the kinds of things that are involved. Yeah, it would be sort of typical strategy you might employ to achieve this target. Right, right. I think what you're trying to explain, it's basically why do we care about doing a net zero building? Like what are we getting out of it? We know we're gonna pay something for it, right? But what do we get out of it? What are the advantages? And maybe in ways that people just could understand, it's gonna be a triple pane window. I mean, that means something to somebody. It's saying that the insulation is gonna be a lot better. I think people can understand, oh, I get it. So then if I did that to my house, I wouldn't have to spend as much to heat it or cool it because it's better insulated. It might have to be just that much big picture. The tricky bit is kind of what you said. Yeah, in fact, just the typical strategy you might use. I don't know that that tells you that there, what's better about a net zero building. Triple pane windows are not what is better about a net zero building. The better is that it doesn't use energy, right? And so we're not burning fuels somewhere else and there's not a nuclear power plant that's making your building go. And so those things are just ways to help us get to that goal. So that's actually the challenge. To me, it's interesting to say that because conceptually that's the challenge for me is that doing the status quo is not mentally that hard to imagine, particularly, it just isn't that hard to imagine, right? You imagine buildings you're already going to, maybe newer ones, supposed to older ones. And then even if I have, I guess I have been into a zero energy building, but I mean, even if I had envisioning what that looks like, if it's a zero energy building, as dumb as this may sound, because the outcome is a zero energy building, almost everything you look at somehow in the way it looks like magic, right? Because you've actually, I mean, I'm being facetious because you've obtained a zero energy building. You kind of understand all the design and material and other things that might have gone into it. What's interesting is that it's hard to imagine between those two. You know, the other thing that's gonna make this a little more complicated, perhaps for everyone's vision of the net zero building, is it used to be really, really hard to do a net zero building. It was sort of cost prohibitive because PVs were so expensive and the properties just weren't available. So you had to go to a lot of extreme strategies in the building to make that happen. One of the things that we're seeing in all our products now is the cost of PVs is coming down so fast that it's not hard to generate the electricity if you have the room, to generate the electricity to get a building to be net zero. And you're gonna start seeing buildings all over the net zero like every other building. It's like, what makes this net zero? Well, because back there's a bunch of PVs. So it's, you know, there's an image in everybody's mind that it's an exotic building, but it certainly doesn't have to be. And that's something that- In the end, the end user's experience and use of the building should be the same because you really, your use of the building should be the same. Your use of the building should not, I disagree with you, Mr. Riddle, and I'm gonna do it in public. It should be the same room, the same way. Because the easiest way to get a net zero building is to build a refrigerator. Who wants to load a refrigerator? You know, that's the extreme version, right? So we're not building refrigerators, we're building buildings where people need to live in them or use them. Our students should be as satisfied with the space. Yeah, that's true. Daylighting can be in contrast to energy usage, right? Usually you don't get in as much daylight through that window as you give up in the heat you're throwing out the window, right? So windows are not, anyway, that's it. So we're talking, so I completely believe that we can build a net zero new building. The part that I'm, like, you know, you kept talking about the two, the part that I'm most interested in in this feasibility study is we've got, you know, five options that are making use of an existing building. And for me, and I know, like in a new building, like you say, you can change the size of the windows, you can make them triple glazed, but those levers are way more constricted in the number of things that we can tweak and pull and change in an existing building are greatly limited. And that's to me where the kind of meat of this feasibility study is getting if we're going for a net zero and we're going for, you know, daylighting and we're going for these things. It's how do we qualitatively compare a new building to these renovation schemes? And, you know, so far we have costs and I just really want to develop, you know, that quality somehow have a way to, and even if it's just a narrative from a professional that says the quality of the experience, you know, at the feasibility level, you know, we're still going to have a slab that's going to have condensation on it because we can't put a vapor barrier underneath it, you know, and we're still going to have, you know, we can't detail where the structure, you know, the buildings in the 60s were not built to really take into account thermal envelopes. So there's parts of the structure to stick outside the thermal envelope. And so our URI is just not, our energy performance is not going to be, you know, and so somewhere in this report, somewhere I really want to be able to talk about the qualitative difference, just we got the numbers and then what is the experience of these buildings? And I've been very, and by the way, like there is so much meat in here. Like you guys, this is just great stuff. But that's the part that, you know, the end result that I really want to be able to, like, and I think we're all kind of getting at that, like. Can we want to vet those qualitative parts of the report with you? And so perhaps that's an agenda for next time. We could bring simple reports addressing renovation versus new construction and different approaches to net zero, let's say, different EUI buildings and what the strategies would be. That was helpful. Like the lead report would start us helping with that, but maybe that's just not the right tool. It's a little bit ahead of where we are. We would have to have a lead meeting and go through goals in these different categories that sustainability sets. And I think it's something we'd love to do with you, but it's not the time, right? Yeah. Yeah, I am going to play a talk paper soon. No, I wanted to say if we go back to the beginning of our meeting, talking about the outreach, since now they are here, you can ask them a little bit. We need to plan a firm, a rich firm, and at some point we need the input of you guys what are the typical of what you do. Because we come from both sides of the phones, things, and then you say, now that's not the way we present. So we need, because at this point, we were thinking maybe I think that would be at the end of January. I guess we should briefly say that. We're going to form a small working group to begin talking about this. And I guess the probably the most efficient thing at this hour is to say, we're going to reach out to you and talk to you about how you do them and what the number we're thinking of and just we'll get back to you separately on that. Sounds good. Just because it's getting late in the afternoon. I mean, like the outreach. If we can't meet next week. Certainly the outreach group will probably try to do the working group. But I'm wondering if we need to have, would it make sense to have a working group around cost issues as well if we're not going to meet for an extended period of time? Somehow I would love to get through that narrative. I want to hear them talk about the narrative. I think I'll just, I don't disagree with the idea of potentially having a small working group that surfaces some scope issues or looks at scope issues, but I want to understand that narrative better and I think they need to guide us through that. Yeah, I think your cost, there's two front approach. One is the narrative and you'll see things that either you like or don't like and jump out. And then the benchmarking thing that we talked about, we'll come back and say, these are the things that are high or low and we can talk about why that is and then that also will be causing a discussion about. So what do you need from us before we have that meeting? So I'm wondering, do we need to have a working group or do we need to, you know? Well, we're going to need a little bit of time to generate, to do some benchmarking and identify the costs, deltas, and why they exist, why this is different than going down the road a couple weeks anyway. I don't think we're holding that way, but just at this stage, I would not be in favor of a working group on cost estimating. I think there's cost estimating things that concern and everyone probably has something to attribute there. And I would, maybe later, but right now I don't really think we should have a pair us down that way. Well, I'm wondering if we can bring closure to this evening or soon at least, so let me ask you what other questions that might be out there. What? Well, I think the punchline for tonight, the bated breath from the public is sort of like, how much is this building going to cost and the one well-known number that the public knows is what we voted on for the Wildwood project. And that was a $64 million price tag. And I believe that number was the whole first, you know, the one- The project budget. The project budget. And so I just wanted to confirm, I mean, I know it's still a moving number at this point. This is still just our first draft of this number, but the number to compare to would be the ones on the soft cost contingency at that evening, et cetera. So it was this page. Next one. One more. No, I think it's not. Those red numbers are project costs. The total project cost. I think we should not compare to Wildwood. That was not an issue at the beginning. No. I don't think you're saying that we should. I think you're warning people not to. Right. Okay. But with, you know, well, I mean, if you compare like the small addition and yeah, I mean, there's lots of the side costs here. If you compare the soft cost cost of a 10 million dollars to building without two cafeterias and two gyms. I mean, it's a different project in general, but just as far as The other one had one cafeteria, one gym. But you're absolutely right. It's a number that's out there that people are aware of and they're going to mentally make it over. It's, you know, it's the same cost, but it's a smaller pocket. Why, you know, it's going to, the comparison is just going to happen. So you just need to be able to, maybe it's a slide or it's just, that just talks about why it's a different project. I think what I, you know, I was just saying, please direct your comments to the chair. Yeah, I guess I'd rather, especially at this late hour, not want to start that conversation except to say that these are very different things to be looked at. And I would want, if we had to go there, I would want to understand all that we need to understand as part of our process long before I did that. But that's, that's kind of my part of the comment that it's not, they're not easily compared, certainly at this stage. Other questions, comments for this evening or shall we move to adjournments or? Eric? I move to adjournments. Second. All in favor. Thank you. There's a lot of questions that I realized. The questions are good. Yeah.