11/24/08 Board of Education Chairwoman Nancy Weissler Says Ham Ave Might Not Open Until April, Thomas Heagney Says maybe September !!!!!!!!!!!!!

January move in doubt for Hamilton Avenue

Written by Ken Borsuk, kborsuk@greenwich-post.com

Breaking News - Borsuk Scoops Everyone Again
Posted 12:29 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008

Any hope of moving Hamilton Avenue School students into their new building in January is fading, but not impossible after air balance testing in the building have so far proven inconclusive.

More testing is being done with results expected to be available by Tuesday, but Board of Education Chairwoman Nancy Weissler has set a strict deadline of Dec. 5 for the building to receive its temporary certificate of occupancy (TCO) from the town. If tests come back with positive results by then, there will be enough time to have the building ready in time for the start of school after the holiday break on Jan. 5, but Ms. Weissler has said if that date can’t be met, the district will wait until April to move the students because of all the disruption it will cause for February tests.

The hope was that testing air balancing, which insures all rooms in the school are getting proper air flow from the heating and cooling system, went well enough that the TCO could be granted and the project’s building committee could hand over custody of the building to the Board of Education today. However, tests have shown more work is needed and Joseph Aliotta, from the project’s architect Swanke Hayden Connel, said this morning at the building committee meeting that further testing has to be done by hand to determine exactly what course of action is required.

The key question before the building committee now is whether the TCO can still be granted even with work still needing to be completed. It remains possible the air balance will meet building code standards before Dec. 5, but not Swanke’s design standards. However, further engineering reports need to be evaluated first. A meeting between Swanke and Worth Construction, the project’s contractor, is expected to be held Monday or Tuesday.

The building committee will next meet Wednesday at 7:30 a.m. in the Havemeyer Building to determine a course of action.

The air balancing appears to be an issue in six rooms in the original part of the building, including the media center, nurse’s office and the English as a second language classroom, but it is conceivable that this could be worked around while the school is in operation and any major repairs could be made over the summer because the air balancing is mainly a comfort issue. Building committee chairman Frank Mazza said at this morning’s meeting there is no discernible discomfort in any of the floors or classrooms.

“I don’t want anyone to get the idea that there’s a room that someone’s going to walk into and they’re freezing,” Mr. Mazza said. “That’s not the case. The rooms are all comfortable at this point. I’ve spent a lot of time in every room. The rooms are fine. The halls are fine. Everything is comfortable. It’s just a question of whether we’re getting enough air into the original rooms to meet the code. If the engineer says we are, we have a pretty good path moving forward.”

Mr. Aliotta said manual calculations through a room-by-room evaluation are now being done to determine what the minimum requirements are for each room in terms of air balance. He said he “absolutely” believes further work would be needed to meet the design standards, but couldn’t say what that would entail or how long it would take. The design standards are higher than ones required by the building codes, which are the ones the town uses to determine if a TCO can be issued.

The evaluation is expected to be done by Tuesday.

Issues remain with emergency lights and the parking garage, but committee members said they believed those issues can be taken care of and would not impact any potential TCO next week.

Committee members and parents in attendance were visibly frustrated by the lack of progress, especially since there had been hope the building could be turned over to the board today.

Committee member Thomas Heagney urged the architect and contractor to work with “a sense of urgency” to get the building, which is more than two years behind schedule, finished. He said the committee had to find a way to “short circuit” the process and complete it.

“If we don’t have that urgency now, we might as well tell the school system that we’ll get the building to them in September,” Mr. Heagney said.

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