By Shelby Stewart-Soldan
ssoldan@mihomepaper.com
Brandon — During the regular meeting on Monday night, the Brandon Board of Education voted unanimously to approve bids for two bid packages for summer 2025 bond projects.
“This is our last group of construction projects for the bond,” said Brian Smilnak, project architect. “There’s some other monies in the bond for technology and some buses, but these are the last two construction-related projects.”
The first bid package, which is bid package six, includes high school parking lot replacements, soccer field improvements, interior security doors, and remodeling the concession stand at the Harvey-Swanson soccer fields.
At the high school, some parking lots including the maintenance lot, transportation lot, soccer field lot and gym lot will be replaced.
“The design was such that we did it differently than the Oakwood and Swanson parking lot,” said Smilnak. “This is a selective base replacement option, so we’re going to have a third party testing agency on site during the demolition and the base preparation, they’ll be testing the base and seeing if there’s areas that are unsuitable. We’ll just attack those core areas and get those out and bring in stone and prepare that base instead of taking all of the base out. They told us we don’t need to take all this base out, so we’re going to do it on a case by case basis.
At the soccer field, they will replace the bleachers, add new concrete for ADA accessibility, replace some fencing, add netting behind the goals, add new wayfinding signage, and remodeling the concession stand.
“Harvey-Swanson’s concession building, we’ll be putting some new interior finishes, replacing the exterior door, replacing the two counter shutters, revising the plumbing for the sinks, adding a permanent heat source, replacing the lighting, replacing the shingle roof, and providing a new ramp up to the toilet rooms that are attached to the Harvey-Swanson building for ADA accessibility,” said Smilnak.
The interior security at the high school are also included, and will be used in place of roll-down gates, which are no longer compliant with fire code. They allow areas of the school to be blocked off in case of fire or for after-school activities such as sporting events to keep patrons concentrated to one area of the building.
In bid package seven, there were projects at the middle school, including parking lot replacement and HVAC component replacements.
“Same concept here as we talked about at the high school, we’re going to be having selective things replaced, have the testing agency on site, make sure we just replace the areas that need to be replaced,” said Smilnak. “The HVAC item we talked about, we’re replacing the partial refrigeration system that’s up on top of the roof that serves the classrooms. It’s not a full replacement of the system, but this will be replacing refrigeration components, those components are out of date, you can’t get them anymore. Refrigeration has changed, code has changed.”
In total, the budget for these projects was $3,983,000, with $2,612,000 for bid package six and $1,371,000 for bid package seven. The bids came in under budget, with bid package six totaling $2,577,069.24 and bid package seven totaling $1,185,542, making the combined total $3,762,945.25.