City Council - Ways and Means Committee Hearing on Docket #1926

Chair, Worrell, Williams, Thank you for watching!

Thank you for watching!

My name is Brian Worrell, District 4 City Councilor, and I'm the Chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Ways and Means. Today is November 6, 2025. The exact time is 10.01 a.m. In accordance with Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, Modifying certain requirements of the open meeting law and relieving public bodies of certain requirements, including the requirement that public body conducts Conducted its meetings in a public place that is open and physically accessible to the public, the City Council will be conducting this hearing virtually via Zoom. This hearing is being recorded. It is also being live streamed at boston.gov backslash city-council-tv and broadcast on Xfinity channel 8, RCN channel 82, and Fios channel 964. Read comments may be sent to the committee email at ccc.wm at boston.gov and will be made part of the record and available to all counselors. Public testimony will be taken at the end of this hearing. Individuals will be called on in the order in which they signed up. We have two minutes to testify. If you wish to sign up for public testimony and have not done so, please email us central staff liaison Karishma Chauhan at K-A-R-I-S-H-M-A dot C-H-M-A dot C-H-M-A dot C-H-M-A dot C-H-M-A dot C-H-M-A dot C-H-M-A dot C-H-M-A dot O-U-H-A-N at Boston.gov for the Zoom link and your name will be added to the list. Today's hearing is on docket number 1926. Message in order for your approval in order authorizing the City of Boston to appropriate the amount of $11,100,000 for the purpose of paying costs for the window and door replacement projects at the following schools. The Gardner Pilot Academy School, the Linden Elementary School, and this includes the payment of all costs incidental or related thereto and for which the City of Boston may be eligible for a grant for the Massachusetts School Building Authority, also known as MSBA. said amount to be expended under the direction of the Public Facilities Department on behalf of the Boston Public Schools. This matter was sponsored by Mayor Michelle Wu and referred to the committee on October 29, 2025. Today, I'm joined by my Councilor colleague, Councilor Flynn, and we also have received a letter of absence from Council President Louijeune. I will now turn it over to today's panelists to introduce themselves and to dive into any presentation. The floor is now yours.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning again, Chair Worrell and Councilor Flynn. I'm Carlton Jones, the Executive Director of the Public Facilities Department, and I'm here with my colleague who will speak momentarily about the matter before you today. We're here for the 2024 Accelerated Repair Program funding through the MSBA, the Massachusetts School Building Authority, for the Gardner Pilot Academy and the Lyndon K-8 School. It's our honor and privilege to continue to work on these projects on behalf of the city and on behalf of Boston Public Schools. We have a number of projects that Mr. McLaughlin will tell you about momentarily and so it's again it's our privilege and pleasure to work with you and and get these school projects done so without further ado I'm going to introduce senior project manager Brian McLaughlin.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and Councilor Flynn. Thank you for this opportunity to come before the body for this hearing. I'm going to share A deck that I'll go through for just gives you an overview of kind of the MSBA, quick overview of the MSBA process and then why we're here today before this body. Let me know. Sorry, I'm just working through this right now. There we go. Can you guys see the first slide? Yes, all right. So before today is a request for funding to support the construction of window and door projects at two schools as part of the 2024 MSBA Accelerator Repair Program. MSBA is a state authority that oversees the funding of public school projects in the state of Massachusetts. It's a reimbursement agency that works with local districts to create affordable, sustainable, energy efficient schools across the Commonwealth. It's funded through one penny of the sales tax. MSBA has two programs, the core program for lodge renovation or new school construction projects like the Dearborn and BAA, and the accelerated repair program, which focuses on the repair of replacement Repair or replacement of roofs, windows, and boiler systems in otherwise structurally sound buildings. Over the past several years, the City of Boston made an effort to increase the participation in the Mass School Building Authority program. As of today, there are 56 projects in various stages of the MSBA process. This slide provides an overview of the status of these 56 projects. of the six core projects, the Dearborn, BAA, JQS, and most recently the Cotter, have completed construction and have students in those buildings. One school, the Shaw-Taylor, is in the pre-design Stage of the process, we've hired an OPM and we're going to be going out for an architect in December, starting in December. The last of the six schools in the core program is the Ruth Batson Academy. That's completing the MSPA's eligibility period action items and will start design later in 2026. Under the Accelerator Repair Program, 32 projects have completed construction. Three are currently in construction. Seven are in design, slated for 2027 construction. and eight projects were invited to stock design at the MSPA board meeting last week. In total, these collaborative efforts with the MSBA reflect $655 million in construction costs, with just over $240 million in reimbursement coming back to the City of Boston. The 2024 Accelerator Repair Program projects were submitted in early 2024. At that time, Boston submitted eight schools to the MSBA for consideration, six window projects and two roof projects. The City Council voted at their February 14, 2024 meeting to support the application submissions to the MSBA. All eight applications were Applications were approved by the MSBA Board at the meeting on October 28, 2024. City Council then appropriated $1.2 million in a loan order on November 20, 2024 to bring on the OPM and Architect. and design of these projects started in early 2025. The Gardner and Linden projects were approved at the MSBA board meeting last Wednesday, October 29th. The Murphy, Everett, Kenney, and O'Donnell schools are anticipated to be approved by the MSBA Board at their meeting in December, which will result in PFD having to come back again Before the council to appropriate the funds for the balance of those four projects, this will likely happen in January when we come back to the council. The Adams design is taking a little bit longer and will likely be approved by the MSBA in February 2026, resulting in us coming back before you guys in March. The last project that was submitted was the Chittick Elementary School. That was removed from further consideration after we did the initial design. It was realized that the cost of the project was going to trigger a significant amount of code required work that we weren't able to undertake at this time as part of this program. So next steps for this, for the Gardner and Linden specifically, PFD in the City of Boston is requesting $11,100,000 from the Council to support the costs associated with the Gardner and Linden window projects. This vote will need two votes at least two weeks apart. Support of this loan order will allow the architect to complete design through winter-spring of 2026. Bid the project in plenty of time for summer 2027 construction. Again, as mentioned above, the remaining ARP schools, the Murphy, Everett, Kenney, O'Donnell, will come back before the council in January. and the Adams School will likely come before you in March of 2025. The last couple slides here which can be shared if it hasn't been shared with you already is just a A bigger overview or larger overview of all the projects that are currently in the MSBA pipeline. It goes through all 56 of the projects, the 50 ARPs in the six cores. So that's it for this presentation at this time. Gladly answer any questions.

Thank you Brian and Carlton for the presentation and all your work to making sure that we are improving and renovating schools and taking advantage of all the funding that is out there for us. I now turn it over to Councilor Flynn for any questions. Councilor, you have the floor.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to say first, before I start, I want to say thank you to Carlton and to Brian. I had an opportunity to work with both gentlemen for the last eight years. They're excellent employees. Do an incredible job for the residents of Boston and for their respective city departments. I want to acknowledge their professionalism and hard work and and attention to detail. This is a lot of staying on top of issues, but Carlton and Brian do an excellent job in doing that. So I want to say thank you to them. I don't necessarily have any questions for them, Mr. Chair. I'm looking forward to supporting this when it comes up for a vote at the appropriate time. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilor. And I only have a couple questions, and maybe this is a question for BPS, but are we concerned that any of these renovations Any of these schools will hinder or prevent summer programming or summer learning from happening during the renovations.

Mr. Chair, I can speak for BPS, especially since I used to work there. So what happens when there are construction projects is the team that plans the summer schedule first finds out what buildings are available. So they just kind of say well the building is going to be offline they just work around it and we do we work hand in hand with them with the facilities department with their planning team to make sure that we don't create difficulties as it relates to space availability or program availability. So they take that into consideration as they move and they plan their programming for the summer.

Awesome. And then, you know, we've heard that construction price has risen over the, you know, couple years that I have, you know, been in office and, you know, even within like the last year. Can you talk to us and kind of give us like an idea, a general understanding of how much costs have grown since, I guess, 2024 till now? I could, well... Since we have applied for these MSBA funded.

So to really answer your question, I have to perform analysis. We can go back and see just how costs have changed. But I can give you an anecdotal story, if you don't mind. I can give you a sense of that. And it's not so much from 2024, but it's really pre-COVID to now. So pre-COVID, I used to complain. I used to vehemently complain. We would have projects, Brian's smiling because he's heard me say this before. We would have projects that would come in at $300 per square foot construction cost. and I used to think that was outrageous. $300 a square foot. I can't believe they're charging that much. Unfortunately, we're also having a fire drill that's going on behind us. I'll let you go after this question. But anyway, I would complain about $300 a square foot. Now the cost is $1,100, $1,200 a square foot. So it's like four times higher. I know and so that does not add more to the building that just means we're just spending more money for the same thing and that really you know we try to figure out what's happening where are these costs going but it's in every sector it's and it's not just for government projects it's across the board So it's just the construction industry has skyrocketed in terms of costs, the escalation side. There is good news, though. So the good news is it feels like it's plateauing. because we're getting bids that are coming in more or less at the estimates now versus before we would see wide swings. We're not seeing the wide swings as much. and many more. At one point we were up to 8% for escalation because we were trying to account for inflation, the potential effect of the tariffs, all sorts of other factors. that we're trying to say well if a project is a two-year project or a three-year project we have to account for higher costs in those later years that's the escalation so we're bringing that down also so industry is saying It's not as bad. They're forecasting not, you know, it's a better forecast in terms of the future. So those are two positives. I don't know that we'll ever see it come down below a thousand dollars a square foot, but at least we won't go you know we're not approaching two thousand dollars it's not just going to continue to rise at least it doesn't seem like it is based on the bids that are coming in and information we're getting from other industry professionals

Well, yeah, I was not expecting to hear four times the cost. That is quite the jump. You have a fire drill over there Carlton and you know this is good work that we want to continue to move forward and it's just great to partner with the administration and your team on helping getting much-needed repairs Thank you for your time and all your work. I just want to thank Councilor Flynn for joining in on this conversation. I don't see any public testimony, so this hearing on document number 1926 is adjourned.