The process of planning for a new Pollard Middle School has been shaped by a history Needham’s elected and appointed officials are determined not to repeat.
Permanent Public Building Committee oversight and practices like hiring a “construction manager at risk” were not always part of the town’s new build routines — resulting in projects that ran over budget, behind schedule, and (on occasion) violated state laws.
The last Pollard Middle School project, in 1992, stands out for its direct impact on Needham’s approach to the renovation and construction of town-owned buildings.
“It resonated through the entire town,” said School Committee Vice Chair Michael Greis. “It changed everything we did for every process.”
Project plans hit the fan
Built in 1958, Pollard underwent major renovations in 1969 and 1992. It was the latter project that became seen as a management and budget fiasco, leading to complaints from Needham residents and an inquiry by Massachusetts Inspector General Robert Cerasoli.
“If anything could go wrong, it did go wrong, over and over again,” said Susan Welby, elected to the School Committee in 1996.
The school principal was named project manager. “The principal was not a construction person, she was an educator,” Welby said. “She kind of got stuck in the middle of a lot of what was going on.”
The project fell to pieces. “It [was] like getting together with your neighbors to do one of those barn raisings, as opposed to hiring an architect and a contractor, and several other people to oversee a project,” said Greis.
A design contract’s fixed fee doubled, invoices were forwarded for payment without verifying the accuracy of amounts billed, municipal procurement and state construction bid laws were violated, oversight and services of the design contractor were deficient, and key project documents along with six months of construction meeting records were lost or misplaced.
Town Meeting removed line-item costs like central air conditioning from the budget. Even so, the project blew past initial estimates of $6 million, reaching $7.3 million (and climbing) at the time of Cerasoli’s report in June 1995. “The Pollard Building Committee approved a total of 24 construction change orders totalling $692,742,” the report states. Cerasoli also found the town overpaid a construction contractor by nearly half a million in the first quarter.
In the process of renovating Pollard, school operations were upended. “They had to shut the building down and move kids,” Welby remembers. “The seventh and eighth grade went to the high school for a long period of time, and [for] the sixth grade they found rental space at Northeastern, I think.”
When the project ended, the final design was radically different from the design drafted in a feasibility study.
After reviewing project documents and interviewing project participants, Cerasoli found that all participants had acted in “good faith,” but were not qualified to oversee the task at hand.
“The problems encountered on the Pollard School project illustrate some of the risks of devoting inadequate resources to oversight of complex, multimillion-dollar municipal construction projects,” he concluded.
To safeguard future projects from “waste and delays,” Cerasoli offered Needham a series of recommendations, most of which revolved around hiring qualified personnel, improving bidding and contracting processes, and keeping track of project records.
Needham took the advice to heart.
Reconstructing Needham’s building practices
Based on the inspector general’s report, the town created health and safety committees (later discontinued) to begin monitoring the impact of building projects on the health of building occupants.
“These health and safety committees helped to bridge between school administration and the teacher’s union, and everybody started working better together,” Welby said.
The report also led to the creation of a construction oversight committee, which in turn birthed the Permanent Public Building Committee in 1996. “It’s made up of professionals, architects, engineers, lawyers, accountants — people with expertise around building projects,” said Welby. “And that has been a godsend to Needham.”
George Kent, a day-one member of the PPBC, was pulled onto the original taskforce for his years of experience in engineering and construction.
“Friends of mine contacted me around the 1995 time period and said, ‘We’ve got a problem here in town that you might be able to help us with,’” he said. After reading Cerasoli’s report, Kent agreed: Needham had a problem.
Over the course of six months, Kent and other taskforce members drafted a response to the inspector general, proposed the multi-phase process that guides Needham’s building projects to this day, and suggested a bylaw that paved the way for the PPBC.
“It’s been a remarkable success story,” said Kent.
The PPBC consists of seven permanent members, selected for their experience, and two temporary members appointed for the project at hand. The committee operates independently but reports to Town Meeting and the town manager.
Since its creation, the PPBC has successfully overseen close to $500 million of capital projects, including six major school projects, ten municipal building projects and multiple building projects for the Department of Public Works.
“I can honestly say that in 30 years we’ve done every project on time and under budget, which is an amazing feat,” Kent said.
“We have come, as a town, such an incredible long way from [the last Pollard] project,” noted Greis, describing Needham’s past approach to building projects as “black and white TV with the rabbit-ears antenna.”
Two years after creating the PPBC, Needham hired a building construction and renovation manager (since renamed Director of Design & Construction) to handle the ever-increasing workload and, in 2018, established Building Design & Construction as a stand-alone department. The Pollard fiasco also led to an overhaul of contracting practices, requiring officials to undergo state training.
The current Pollard project has benefitted from the oversight and expertise of the PPBC and Massachusetts School Building Authority, Needham’s Building Design & Construction Department, HMFH Architects, construction manager at risk BOND Building Construction, Inc., and the perspective of Needham’s educators and School Committee.
Following Pollard renovations, Needham needed to rebuild trust with residents as much as it needed to reconstruct its approach to building projects, Welby said. She noted that health and safety committees, better lines of communication, negotiations, the work of the PPBC and the oversight of town departments all played a role in re-establishing trust.
“It took a long time to build up that trust,” she said. “[But] I think that today there are probably only a few people that you talk to that are going to remember that disaster.”
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