This article was updated at 12:40 pm on March 24 to clarify remarks made by Selectman Herb Rosenthal.

Neither the chairman of Newtown's Public Building and Site Commission (PBSC) nor the president of the firm handling Phase 1 construction and cost estimating for a planned new community center are expressing the level of concern and frustration as did residents and former volunteers who sat before and with local selectmen March 20.

Despite concerns that anticipated project and site development costs are escalating and causing the size of the center, which was approved in 2016 at referendum, to be compromised and downsized, PBSC Chairman Robert Mitchell and Mark Principi, who is president of Caldwell & Walsh - which is charged with construction management - both told

The Newtown Bee on March 22 that the community center's development process is on track.

"We're right where we should be," Mr Principi said, with Mr Mitchell agreeing. Mr Mitchell added that the project is probably in a better place at this stage than other recent municipal projects he has helped oversee because of the highly detailed public information campaign and vetting conducted by volunteers on ad hoc committees along with appointed citizens who worked to gather significant public input while researching specific features that might be included in a finished community center.

First Selectman Pat Llodra told her board and representatives working on the project that she feared a "crisis of confidence" because preliminary per-square-foot cost estimates that were floated in late 2015 were significantly lower than estimates presented most recently.

Geralyn Hoerauf, project consultant and senior project manager at STV | DPM (Diversified Project Management), said that besides basing those preliminary estimates on relatively limited specifics about the community center's planned scope and budget in late 2015, commercial construction costs have been rising faster than normal, compounding increases as more knowns have been factored into the cost ratio formula.

Some of the greatest concerns are being expressed by volunteers who worked in community center advisory roles.

In a March 14 letter to The Newtown Bee, former advisory committee member Kinga Walsh said, "The spending and cost per square foot for the community center has increased $150/sf since December 2015. The initial estimates provided to the Commission by the town hired consultants were at $308/sf. The current estimate presented Monday [March 6], per the architects, stands at $459/sf. This discrepancy needs to be understood and rectified."

Similar concerns being expressed by resident Susan Ludwig, a longtime volunteer with the Newtown Torpedoes swim team program, appeared to be compounded when Phil Clark of Claris Construction and a member of the PBSC sat before the selectmen March 20, stating his company could bring the project in for $250 to $300 per square foot.

"There's something wrong with the numbers, I don't know what they are and it's really frustrating," Mr Clark said. "I do believe we can bring it in for $250 to $300. I'll do it tomorrow and make a lot of money on it."

Mr Clark cited the $90 per square foot cost Claris was able to achieve on the NYA Sports & Fitness facility at Fairfield Hills, as well as a private 20,000-square-foot swimming club that his company completed for $250 per square foot. He also acknowledged that these were not public sector projects, which Mr Mitchell affirmed are subject to longer development timelines and added costs like Connecticut's prevailing wage requirement that could add as much as 30 percent to a finished public building project versus a similar private project.

Factoring prevailing wage into the community center budget, Mr Clark said "labor is about 45 percent of the project." Stating that he was an architect, Mr Clark also said that "most architects like to put their hearts into their design, maybe too much. And they're looking for that national magazine with their beautiful design [in it] and they get carried away."

"I think we're going down a rabbit hole we won't get out of," he added.

Volunteers Express Concerns

After some discussion with design team representatives affirming that a location identified as "Site B" was the most optimal of three adjacent sites just west of NYA, Mrs Llodra brought up former community center advisers Ms Walsh, Carla Kron, John Boccuzzi, and Andrew Clure to join the conversation.

Ms Kron asked how much had been spent on site development to date, and how much more would be anticipated. Ms Hoerauf replied that it would be months before solid costs could be qualified.

When asked by Ms Walsh to clarify whether the project was already facing cost overruns, Ms Hoerauf replied "not exactly." When pressed to expand on that comment by Selectman Will Rodgers, Ms Hoerauf explained that as the process begins, 20 percent of the $15 million "owners' budget" is earmarked for all extraneous costs, before an additional ten percent is allocated for unknown contingencies as the project evolves.

"At this point, we're targeting $12 million for construction costs," Ms Hoerauf said. "But we haven't made any design decisions at all - materials, furnishings, mechanicals, materials. We can't assign a cost so we can't assign cost overruns."

Selectman Herb Rosenthal then asked how much more will it cost before the project can go out to bid.

Ms Hoerauf replied that she was anticipating about $800,000 in architectural fees, which is "well under ten percent" of the industry standard for such projects.

"This project isn't any different than any other project," Ms Hoerauf said. She said as a design team member, "you do your best to spec out the project, solicit costs from consultants, then run it through the local process. Then the project develops the way the owner directs."

Mrs Llodra then pointed out that "the longer we are uncertain about what we are doing the more it costs - it's part of the money drain," adding that the design team needs to "get hold of this and make it happen."

Mrs Llodra said that the level of frustration being expressed by residents and advisory volunteers, and the inability for her to facilitate some consensus around how a finished community center looks was causing her and others to make room for the possibility that it cannot be completed within the expectations of General Electric, which gifted the town $10 million of the approximate $14.5 million construction budget.

Selectman Will Rodgers reacted, saying, "I think everybody is frustrated with the chicken/egg issue of the design costs."

Picking up on an assertion by Mr Rosenthal that another option to contain costs would have been to complete the project using a design/build firm, Mr Rodgers said, "You can do design/build and hand it off - take the easy way out."

Since the project is already in progress, however, the design/build option is no longer feasible.

"What do we want and what will it cost have to talk to each other," Mr Rodgers said. "We have been as thorough as we could be. It's unhelpful to focus on one side or another - the saddest thing is hearing that we should give the money back because we can't make a decision. We need to move forward."

The conversation at the selectmen's meeting prompted calls to Mr Mitchell and Mr Principi, who said they are both comfortable with the current cost estimates, given the significant number of unknowns at this stage of the project.

Too Early To Tell

Mr Mitchell suggested that as more information becomes clear about the site development and specific features of the facility, it is quite possible that more of the budget could be shifted to make a larger aquatic component. The last thing Mr Principi said he wanted to see as both an affiliate of the project and a Newtown taxpayer is "having to downsize the number of pool lanes because the money is being eaten up prolonging these early stages of planning.

"We're not even in the schematic phase of this project," Mr Principi said. "The plans, the budget, the final designs, the options are all part of a long process. People are [becoming impatient], but they have to give the process a chance to work. The project manager is working with an architect, who is working with a group of owners. We haven't even decided what the plan is, but we have a budget. The schematics are due next month, and we're building in a process that includes a construction manager, budgeting, design development, construction documents, representatives of specific trades when it's time."

Mr Mitchell echoed those thoughts, saying it would be impossible to compare a project like NYA to the planned community center. He said even though it is close to "site B" for the community center, NYA was constructed on a "much cleaner site to work with, and you're dealing with a municipal project - which involves a whole different set of protocols and financing, a whole different set of reviews, and we're dealing with state and local legislative processes to get the job done."

While empathizing with volunteers who worked for more than a year to gather information to develop recommendations, the PBSC chairman said that extra time was a 100 percent add-on to other public projects that are typically managed by just several people who are making "executive decisions" that are borne out in the finished product.

"Since this was a true community project, we tried to make the advisory process so inclusive it resulted in a very long vetting process using various committees to make recommendations," Mr Mitchell said. "What is unusual from a process standpoint is the amount of public input we had and used to begin developing plans for the project. As a result, we can be confident that what we have is the best possible [project] for the town."

Mr Mitchell said it is inappropriate to compare the community center process to what occurred during the building of the new Sandy Hook School, because the school project was guided by state protocols and defined design parameters.

"You don't have that with the community center. We're starting from scratch here," Mr Mitchell said, adding that when looking at the closest preferred community center design in Ridgefield, that community was at about the same place in the process as the Newtown project is now.

In an attempt to explain the perceived cost escalations from late 2015 to early 2017, Mr Mitchell said, "My instinct is that those early numbers were not all-inclusive of project costs.

"I think what we're getting is exactly what we voted for," he said of the authorizing referendum on the community center. "We voted to spend X amount of dollars on a true community center. For what we see right now, we don't see any of the money being poorly spent at all. It's the reality of a commercial construction project that is coming into play right now."