July 19, 2004
Building boom | The college facilities "arms race" prompts a raft of new construction on Maine campuses
By Sean Donahue
Summertime is hardly downtime for Bowdoin College's Don Borkowski. As capital projects program manager in the college's facilities management office, Borkowski overseas large construction and renovation projects, and needs to accomplish as much as possible during the relative lull that comes with summer break.
This year, one of his biggest concerns is the impending completion of Kanbar Hall, a $9 million, 26,000-square-foot building that will house the school's psychology and education departments. Begun last summer, the three-story brick building has to be finished by the end of August, so its offices, classrooms and lab space are ready for returning students and faculty.
Just as that project winds down, Borkowski will oversee the start of construction for two new dorms, as well as pre-construction design and planning work for an upcoming renovation of the Walker Art Building. Though it seems like an unusually full schedule, the pace and scope of Bowdoin's building campaign is just part of what Borkowski and college administrators around the country call the "arms race": If one college builds a new dorm or science center, competing campuses have to bring their own facilities into parity.
"I've been here since 1996 and [construction] hasn't slowed down at all," says Borkowski. "The market is so competitive now that you have to provide the best facilities and make them the most attractive in order to get the best students and faculty."
Signs of the arms race can be found on college and university campuses across Maine this summer. Like Bowdoin, the University of New England in Biddeford hopes to break ground on a new dorm in August; Thomas College in Waterville opened its own new dorm last fall; major projects are underway or planned at nearly every campus in the University of Maine system, including the University of Maine at Presque Isle's long-awaited $9 million health and physical education complex. (See "Under construction," next page.)
Nationwide, education sector construction contracts are estimated to total about $42.5 billion in 2004, according to McGraw-Hill Construction Analytics in Lexington, Mass.ˆ which makes the educational arms race a potential windfall for contractors. The near-constant demand for new facilities also makes the education sector less cyclical than other commercial construction markets, notes Denis Landry, president of Payton Maine Corp. in Saco, which is building Bowdoin's Kanbar Hall. "The college and university market always seems to be doing construction," says Landry. "That's why we like to do college projects."
Campus projects also tend to be different ˆ often more interesting, sometimes more challenging ˆ than a basic office construction job, say contractors and college facilities managers. Educational facilities often call for special infrastructure to support laboratory work and other functions. Likewise, colleges and universities tend to adopt new building techniques, like Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design standards, before they catch on in the commercial market.
It's a luxury colleges and universities can afford because they typically are building facilities expected to serve one purpose for decades, says John Rasmussen, a construction engineer with the University of Southern Maine's office of facilities management. "We're investing for a much longer term," he says. "A commercial developer might not necessarily know how a building is going to be used after a few years, so they say, 'I'm not going to put something in there that may not pay me back in three years.'"
Securing and performing these jobs can be a slightly different experience, too. Whether it's dealing with different bidding processes for public and private schools, working under tighter deadlines or helping a school figure out how to fit everything it needs in a building while remaining within budget, educational construction carries its own learning curve.
Prequalifying the competition
Most college construction projects start when the administration identifies a specific need such as a new dorm or better athletic facilities. Other times, though, individual projects are part of larger development plan. In 2002, for example, Colby College completed a long-range strategic plan for its educational programs, services and facilities, which included about $30 million worth of current or soon-to-commence construction projects surrounding a new open space called the Colby Green.
The college plans to build three new buildings around the green, including the Schair-Swenson-Watson Alumni Center, started in April with Woolwich-based Reed & Reed as construction manager, and the Diamond Building, a 53,000-square-foot, $10 million classroom, office and laboratory building for the college's social sciences departments planned for next spring. Rather than containing traditional classrooms, the Diamond Building is designed to accommodate the department's focus on research and interdisciplinary studies, with features such as a room wired for phone banks where students can perform public opinion polling.
By early next year, the college expects to begin looking for a contractor to handle the job. Rather than putting it out to an open bid, though, Colby's policy is to pre-qualify bidders for its projects ˆ essentially asking certain contractors, typically firms that have worked for the college before, if they're interested in taking on the job. The idea is to focus on contractors the school believes has demonstrated skills and experience in the education sector ˆ a company that is comfortable with details like the Diamond Building's LEED standards ˆ rather than simply looking for the lowest bid. "Competition is a good thing, but we like to have competition among good, qualified contractors," says Patricia Crandlemire Murphy, Colby's director of physical plant.
Bowdoin College employs a similar bid-by-invitation process, says Borkowski. The school asked five contractors to bid on the Kanbar Hall project, from which it chose Payton Maine, the firm that built Bowdoin's Children's Center in 2002. The main challenge for would-be contractors was how to put up the structure within the tight confines of the site: Kanbar Hall is being built on the corner of two public roads, and has been situated between an existing building and a stand of old pine trees. "The idea is that when the building is finished it will look like it has been there for some time, but that really limited the amount of space around the building," says Landry of Payton Maine.
To free up space, Payton's workers park off site and walk about a quarter of a mile to the project. The company also set up a staging area for certain materials within a fenced-off portion of a grass quadrangle in front of a neighboring building. But the site is still so small that Payton had to schedule many of its subcontractors to come one at a time. For example, rather than simultaneously performing excavation and pouring concrete foundations, Payton's concrete subcontractor had to wait until all the excavation was completed and that contractor had cleared its equipment from the site.
Though Kanbar Hall was not designed completely to LEED specifications, the building incorporates efficiency measures such as variable-speed HVAC systems, low-flow faucets and natural lighting features. In addition, Payton is recycling as much of its construction debris as possible in order to minimize waste. Though LEED, or "green," design and job-site recycling are relatively new to Payton, Landry believes educational projects are good training for the future. "The state has started to use green construction in its building projects, and I think you're going to start seeing it more in the private sector," says Landry. "Now that we've gained some experience in this type of construction it can only help us."
The public process
The recent building binge at Maine's public universities is similarly inspired by both academic demands and the logistics of serving thousands of students. At USM's Portland campus, for example, construction is underway on the new Joel and Linda Abromson Community Education Center, a $7.2 million, 32,000-square-foot building for the university's Center for Continuing Education, the Institute for Family-Owned Business and the Department of Conferences.
The building will contain office space, lecture halls, classrooms and a new, 500-seat auditorium ˆ alongside the $10 million, 1,200-space parking garage built as phase one of the project and completed earlier this year. Like most new college buildings, the Abromson Center includes energy efficiency features rarely seen in a commercial office building, such as geothermal heating and a rainwater collection system to flush the building's toilets.
Unlike private colleges, though, USM's projects are funded by state money in addition to private donations ˆ in particular, $8 million from the $36.7 million higher education bond approved by voters in 2001. The Abromson Center also received $720,000 in federal funding to build a pedestrian bridge above Bedford Street in Portland to handle student foot traffic.
Because of requirements that come with state and federal funds, the bidding process for public university construction jobs must be wide open. USM's John Rasmussen had to advertise the job in three of Maine's major daily newspapers, as well as file the plans with nine national construction "plan rooms," such as McGraw-Hill's Dodge, where contractors troll for potential jobs. State rules also require USM to take the lowest bid from a qualified company, even if it would prefer to work with another contractor whose bid came in a little higher.
For the Abromson Center, though, USM chose a different type of contract. Rather than a simple design-bid-build contract, in which the contractor bids on the job as specified by the architects, USM solicited bids for a construction manager at risk, in which the contractor consults on the design and provides scheduling and cost-estimating services. "The typical design-bid-build process works ˆ you get your building built," Rasmussen says, "but we're looking for ways to improve the process and get a better building in the end."
Rasmussen narrowed the field to six contractors, and Portland-based Granger Northern ultimately delivered the lowest bid to build the parking garage and provide construction management services for the Abromson Center. (Granger's project manager for the job did not return phone calls in time for this story.)
Cutting costs
The University of Maine at Presque Isle also went with a construction manager at risk contract for its own major project on tap this summer, a new Health and Physical Education Complex ˆ but not without a few false starts along the way. Since physical education is one of the school's biggest majors, UMPI planned for a $9 million building that will house a new gymnasium, fitness center and training space where phys-ed majors can work with new equipment and learn to treat athletes.
The university received $5.6 million from the 2001 state bond issue, and in 2002 launched a capital campaign ˆ which is still ongoing ˆ to raise the remaining $3.6 million. Recognizing the acute need for the new facility, the UMaine trustees even agreed to waive a rule requiring that all funding be in place before campuses can begin a construction project. Then, last July, original bids for the job all came in about 20% higher than expected for reasons that are still unclear, according to Charlie Bonin, UMPI's vice president for finance and administration. (Some of the cost overruns may have stemmed from the size and scope of the building, others from increasing costs for materials such as steel.)
Whatever the reasons, UMPI and Portland-based SMRT, the project architect, had to revisit the design and begin looking for cost savings, at which point UMPI decided to solicit bids from contractors to provide construction management services. From a field of four contractors, UMPI in February selected Vermont-based Pizzagalli Construction, which has an office in South Portland, to provide what's known as "value engineering" ˆ going over each piece of the design, estimating individual costs and suggesting various changes.
"Value engineering [makes sense] because you're not running the risk of redesigning the building, putting it out to bid again only to find out it's still over budget," says Garret Bertolini, Pizzagalli's project manager for the UMPI Health and Physical Education Complex.
So far, Pizzagalli and UMPI have found several cost savings. The original plan for a 60,000-square-foot building has been scaled back to 45,000 sq. ft. Aluminum interior doors have been replaced by hollow metal ones, for about $30,000 in savings. Pizzagalli shaved another $30,000 off the building's price by removing a smoke evacuation system planned for the building's lobby. Parking lots that would have been paved instead will be surfaced with gravel, saving about $14,000.
With the value engineering process complete, Pizzagalli is currently putting together a final price and bid for the job, with the firm acting as construction manager. Pizzagalli doesn't intend to do the work itself, but is working with a team of subcontractors to put together a schedule and total cost for completing the job. Though UMPI will put the project out to another public bid if Pizzagalli can't put together a package that meets the university's budget, both parties say they would like to continue the relationship. "It could work to our advantage because when [Pizzagalli] hits the ground running to get all the subcontractors in line, they're already going to know what [pieces of the design] we've looked at and what we haven't," says Bonin.
Bonin hopes to break ground on the building in August, and expects the building to be largely complete by the same time next year. Despite being absorbed in the day-to-day struggle to get the building constructed, Bonin believes the finished product will be a campus landmark, the biggest project in years at the university.
The long-term impact of the current facilities arms race also is on Don Borkowski's mind these days. Because he's overseeing buildings that have to last 50 years or more, Borkowski can't help but think of current opinions about previous building eras ˆ such as some of the drab institutional construction of the 50s and 60s ˆ and wonder how well Bowdoin's buildings from the late 90s and beginning of 21st century will age. "I don't want someone 50 years from now looking at a project I did and saying 'What the heck were they thinking?'" says Borkowski. "That's the worst feeling."
This year, one of his biggest concerns is the impending completion of Kanbar Hall, a $9 million, 26,000-square-foot building that will house the school's psychology and education departments. Begun last summer, the three-story brick building has to be finished by the end of August, so its offices, classrooms and lab space are ready for returning students and faculty.
Just as that project winds down, Borkowski will oversee the start of construction for two new dorms, as well as pre-construction design and planning work for an upcoming renovation of the Walker Art Building. Though it seems like an unusually full schedule, the pace and scope of Bowdoin's building campaign is just part of what Borkowski and college administrators around the country call the "arms race": If one college builds a new dorm or science center, competing campuses have to bring their own facilities into parity.
"I've been here since 1996 and [construction] hasn't slowed down at all," says Borkowski. "The market is so competitive now that you have to provide the best facilities and make them the most attractive in order to get the best students and faculty."
Signs of the arms race can be found on college and university campuses across Maine this summer. Like Bowdoin, the University of New England in Biddeford hopes to break ground on a new dorm in August; Thomas College in Waterville opened its own new dorm last fall; major projects are underway or planned at nearly every campus in the University of Maine system, including the University of Maine at Presque Isle's long-awaited $9 million health and physical education complex. (See "Under construction," next page.)
Nationwide, education sector construction contracts are estimated to total about $42.5 billion in 2004, according to McGraw-Hill Construction Analytics in Lexington, Mass.ˆ which makes the educational arms race a potential windfall for contractors. The near-constant demand for new facilities also makes the education sector less cyclical than other commercial construction markets, notes Denis Landry, president of Payton Maine Corp. in Saco, which is building Bowdoin's Kanbar Hall. "The college and university market always seems to be doing construction," says Landry. "That's why we like to do college projects."
Campus projects also tend to be different ˆ often more interesting, sometimes more challenging ˆ than a basic office construction job, say contractors and college facilities managers. Educational facilities often call for special infrastructure to support laboratory work and other functions. Likewise, colleges and universities tend to adopt new building techniques, like Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design standards, before they catch on in the commercial market.
It's a luxury colleges and universities can afford because they typically are building facilities expected to serve one purpose for decades, says John Rasmussen, a construction engineer with the University of Southern Maine's office of facilities management. "We're investing for a much longer term," he says. "A commercial developer might not necessarily know how a building is going to be used after a few years, so they say, 'I'm not going to put something in there that may not pay me back in three years.'"
Securing and performing these jobs can be a slightly different experience, too. Whether it's dealing with different bidding processes for public and private schools, working under tighter deadlines or helping a school figure out how to fit everything it needs in a building while remaining within budget, educational construction carries its own learning curve.
Prequalifying the competition
Most college construction projects start when the administration identifies a specific need such as a new dorm or better athletic facilities. Other times, though, individual projects are part of larger development plan. In 2002, for example, Colby College completed a long-range strategic plan for its educational programs, services and facilities, which included about $30 million worth of current or soon-to-commence construction projects surrounding a new open space called the Colby Green.
The college plans to build three new buildings around the green, including the Schair-Swenson-Watson Alumni Center, started in April with Woolwich-based Reed & Reed as construction manager, and the Diamond Building, a 53,000-square-foot, $10 million classroom, office and laboratory building for the college's social sciences departments planned for next spring. Rather than containing traditional classrooms, the Diamond Building is designed to accommodate the department's focus on research and interdisciplinary studies, with features such as a room wired for phone banks where students can perform public opinion polling.
By early next year, the college expects to begin looking for a contractor to handle the job. Rather than putting it out to an open bid, though, Colby's policy is to pre-qualify bidders for its projects ˆ essentially asking certain contractors, typically firms that have worked for the college before, if they're interested in taking on the job. The idea is to focus on contractors the school believes has demonstrated skills and experience in the education sector ˆ a company that is comfortable with details like the Diamond Building's LEED standards ˆ rather than simply looking for the lowest bid. "Competition is a good thing, but we like to have competition among good, qualified contractors," says Patricia Crandlemire Murphy, Colby's director of physical plant.
Bowdoin College employs a similar bid-by-invitation process, says Borkowski. The school asked five contractors to bid on the Kanbar Hall project, from which it chose Payton Maine, the firm that built Bowdoin's Children's Center in 2002. The main challenge for would-be contractors was how to put up the structure within the tight confines of the site: Kanbar Hall is being built on the corner of two public roads, and has been situated between an existing building and a stand of old pine trees. "The idea is that when the building is finished it will look like it has been there for some time, but that really limited the amount of space around the building," says Landry of Payton Maine.
To free up space, Payton's workers park off site and walk about a quarter of a mile to the project. The company also set up a staging area for certain materials within a fenced-off portion of a grass quadrangle in front of a neighboring building. But the site is still so small that Payton had to schedule many of its subcontractors to come one at a time. For example, rather than simultaneously performing excavation and pouring concrete foundations, Payton's concrete subcontractor had to wait until all the excavation was completed and that contractor had cleared its equipment from the site.
Though Kanbar Hall was not designed completely to LEED specifications, the building incorporates efficiency measures such as variable-speed HVAC systems, low-flow faucets and natural lighting features. In addition, Payton is recycling as much of its construction debris as possible in order to minimize waste. Though LEED, or "green," design and job-site recycling are relatively new to Payton, Landry believes educational projects are good training for the future. "The state has started to use green construction in its building projects, and I think you're going to start seeing it more in the private sector," says Landry. "Now that we've gained some experience in this type of construction it can only help us."
The public process
The recent building binge at Maine's public universities is similarly inspired by both academic demands and the logistics of serving thousands of students. At USM's Portland campus, for example, construction is underway on the new Joel and Linda Abromson Community Education Center, a $7.2 million, 32,000-square-foot building for the university's Center for Continuing Education, the Institute for Family-Owned Business and the Department of Conferences.
The building will contain office space, lecture halls, classrooms and a new, 500-seat auditorium ˆ alongside the $10 million, 1,200-space parking garage built as phase one of the project and completed earlier this year. Like most new college buildings, the Abromson Center includes energy efficiency features rarely seen in a commercial office building, such as geothermal heating and a rainwater collection system to flush the building's toilets.
Unlike private colleges, though, USM's projects are funded by state money in addition to private donations ˆ in particular, $8 million from the $36.7 million higher education bond approved by voters in 2001. The Abromson Center also received $720,000 in federal funding to build a pedestrian bridge above Bedford Street in Portland to handle student foot traffic.
Because of requirements that come with state and federal funds, the bidding process for public university construction jobs must be wide open. USM's John Rasmussen had to advertise the job in three of Maine's major daily newspapers, as well as file the plans with nine national construction "plan rooms," such as McGraw-Hill's Dodge, where contractors troll for potential jobs. State rules also require USM to take the lowest bid from a qualified company, even if it would prefer to work with another contractor whose bid came in a little higher.
For the Abromson Center, though, USM chose a different type of contract. Rather than a simple design-bid-build contract, in which the contractor bids on the job as specified by the architects, USM solicited bids for a construction manager at risk, in which the contractor consults on the design and provides scheduling and cost-estimating services. "The typical design-bid-build process works ˆ you get your building built," Rasmussen says, "but we're looking for ways to improve the process and get a better building in the end."
Rasmussen narrowed the field to six contractors, and Portland-based Granger Northern ultimately delivered the lowest bid to build the parking garage and provide construction management services for the Abromson Center. (Granger's project manager for the job did not return phone calls in time for this story.)
Cutting costs
The University of Maine at Presque Isle also went with a construction manager at risk contract for its own major project on tap this summer, a new Health and Physical Education Complex ˆ but not without a few false starts along the way. Since physical education is one of the school's biggest majors, UMPI planned for a $9 million building that will house a new gymnasium, fitness center and training space where phys-ed majors can work with new equipment and learn to treat athletes.
The university received $5.6 million from the 2001 state bond issue, and in 2002 launched a capital campaign ˆ which is still ongoing ˆ to raise the remaining $3.6 million. Recognizing the acute need for the new facility, the UMaine trustees even agreed to waive a rule requiring that all funding be in place before campuses can begin a construction project. Then, last July, original bids for the job all came in about 20% higher than expected for reasons that are still unclear, according to Charlie Bonin, UMPI's vice president for finance and administration. (Some of the cost overruns may have stemmed from the size and scope of the building, others from increasing costs for materials such as steel.)
Whatever the reasons, UMPI and Portland-based SMRT, the project architect, had to revisit the design and begin looking for cost savings, at which point UMPI decided to solicit bids from contractors to provide construction management services. From a field of four contractors, UMPI in February selected Vermont-based Pizzagalli Construction, which has an office in South Portland, to provide what's known as "value engineering" ˆ going over each piece of the design, estimating individual costs and suggesting various changes.
"Value engineering [makes sense] because you're not running the risk of redesigning the building, putting it out to bid again only to find out it's still over budget," says Garret Bertolini, Pizzagalli's project manager for the UMPI Health and Physical Education Complex.
So far, Pizzagalli and UMPI have found several cost savings. The original plan for a 60,000-square-foot building has been scaled back to 45,000 sq. ft. Aluminum interior doors have been replaced by hollow metal ones, for about $30,000 in savings. Pizzagalli shaved another $30,000 off the building's price by removing a smoke evacuation system planned for the building's lobby. Parking lots that would have been paved instead will be surfaced with gravel, saving about $14,000.
With the value engineering process complete, Pizzagalli is currently putting together a final price and bid for the job, with the firm acting as construction manager. Pizzagalli doesn't intend to do the work itself, but is working with a team of subcontractors to put together a schedule and total cost for completing the job. Though UMPI will put the project out to another public bid if Pizzagalli can't put together a package that meets the university's budget, both parties say they would like to continue the relationship. "It could work to our advantage because when [Pizzagalli] hits the ground running to get all the subcontractors in line, they're already going to know what [pieces of the design] we've looked at and what we haven't," says Bonin.
Bonin hopes to break ground on the building in August, and expects the building to be largely complete by the same time next year. Despite being absorbed in the day-to-day struggle to get the building constructed, Bonin believes the finished product will be a campus landmark, the biggest project in years at the university.
The long-term impact of the current facilities arms race also is on Don Borkowski's mind these days. Because he's overseeing buildings that have to last 50 years or more, Borkowski can't help but think of current opinions about previous building eras ˆ such as some of the drab institutional construction of the 50s and 60s ˆ and wonder how well Bowdoin's buildings from the late 90s and beginning of 21st century will age. "I don't want someone 50 years from now looking at a project I did and saying 'What the heck were they thinking?'" says Borkowski. "That's the worst feeling."
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