The planned renovation for Knoch High School has run into a snag, as the Knoch School Board rejected all general construction and landscaping bids at a special meeting Wednesday night, Aug. 16.

The rationale, according to Knoch superintendent David Foley, was that all general construction bids came in higher than expected, making it hard for them to fit into the district’s 2023-24 budget of $38.5 million. This budget was officially set June 16.

“The base bids exceeded our overall budget, primarily because the general construction part of the bid was much higher than we anticipated,” Foley said.

This means that the start of the renovation will most likely be pushed back. However, Foley is still hopeful that the project still will be finished by its target date of fall 2025.

“The start of the project may be six to eight weeks out now,” Foley said.

Three construction firms put in bids for the project, and all were rejected. It took aggressive lobbying from Knoch’s construction manager to even obtain the bids, said Foley.

“What would be best for the district would be if there was more than three general contractors bidding on the project,” Foley said. “There was concern that we weren’t going to even have three.”

Foley blames the higher-than-expected bids in part on construction labor shortages, which have driven wages upward.

“I think the general contractor has some challenges getting workforce to get work completed in all of the jobs that they might be working on,” Foley said.

The district did accept bids for the plumbing, electrical, HVAC and food service portions of the project and will hold them for an indefinite period of time while it seeks new bids for the general construction. According to Foley, these bids came in lower than expected.

In the coming weeks, Knoch will work with architectural firm DRAW Collective to remake the plans for the renovation to reduce the scope and costs of the project. Already, major changes have been made to the plans to cut costs.

“We were going to move our tennis courts and move our maintenance facility,” Foley said. “There's not really a need to do all of those things now, and that would be a significant savings that gets us closer to getting within the budget.”

Only one firm placed a bid for the landscaping. The school board threw that one out as well, as part of its attempt to save costs. Planned changes to the exterior of the renovated school would have made the landscaping bid irrelevant.

“We rejected the landscape bid because a lot of that landscape was designed to address the back part of the school,” Foley said. “Most of that landscape bid is no longer going to be applicable because the back road has changed so much. We’re not even going to do that part of it.”

Foley says it could take six to eight weeks to solicit new bids for general construction and landscaping.