ANSONIA – Members of a newly restructured school building commission are scheduled to choose a design firm to oversee the construction of a new middle school.
A meeting is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Feb. 11 at the board of education’s administrative office (42 Grove St). The meeting is open to the public.
The city previously received 11 bids in response to a request for qualifications sent out in October. However, following November’s election, new Mayor Frank Tyszka replaced eight of the commission’s 12 members.
The new membership held their first meeting Jan. 29 to discuss the bids received. Consultant Charles Warrington, of project management firm Colliers Project Leaders, gave a presentation looping in the commission’s new members to the state of the project.
According to Warrington, the city is still on pace to open the doors of a new middle school on Pulaski Highway by its initial target date of September 2029. However, he said the commission will need to move quickly to select a firm in order to meet that goal.
Warrington said the $100 million project – which was approved by voters in a 2023 referendum – will likely cost the city about $17.4 million, after reimbursement from the state is factored in.
The state legislature previously approved an 87 percent reimbursement rate for the project in 2024. Warrington said the estimated cost to the city factors in expenses which the state does not consider reimbursable.
The city’s share of the project will be paid for through borrowing, according to a capital spending plan approved in 2024.
Warrington said the state’s reimbursement rate is contingent on the city getting shovels in the ground by July 2026. While the city almost certainly won’t meet that deadline, Warrington said they could file to extend that deadline by a year, and that filing would be “not a big deal.”
The estimated cost also includes expenses related to the construction of a new school administrative building, which will be located on the premises of the new middle school.
Warrington said once the city selects a firm, the design process would take about 16 months from start to finish. That process includes getting necessary state approvals and local permits from boards including the planning and zoning and inland wetlands commissions.
Then, the construction process would take about 20 to 22 months to complete. Warrington said that could be completed by April or May 2029, giving the school district the summer to make the transition to the new school.
The school building commission also scheduled another meeting for Feb. 4 to discuss the bids received. However, they are not scheduled to take any action at that meeting.
That meeting is also open to the public, and you can view the agenda here.
After the election, Tyszka said he may need to send the request for qualifications back to the drawing board due to errors in the document – including multiple references to “Madison” instead of “Ansonia.” However, Warrington said during the Jan. 29 meeting that those errors were typos made by his firm, and that the qualifications in the document were all accurate.
Tyszka has previously said the new middle school project will continue as planned under his administration.
According to the request for qualifications, the new middle school would be about 132,457 square feet. That’s slightly larger than the current middle school, which is 110,545 square feet, according to city land records.
The current school building on Howard Avenue is more than 85 years old. It has extensive code compliance issues and lacks usable outdoor space, according to previous long-range facilities studies.
Renovating the current school would cost about as much as it would to just build a new school, Superintendent Joseph DiBacco said in 2022. Prior studies also identified serious issues with the schools’ administrative offices on 42 Grove St.