The School Construction Authority wastes big bucks on design consultants for new buildings, and the Department of Education needlessly farms out millions for designing upgrading projects and maintaining school buildings.

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

As the Bloomberg administration threatens layoffs, angry professional and technical school workers say the city would be better off slashing management fat and wasteful contracts that siphon off millions of taxpayer dollars.

“They keep hiring high-paid managers while cutting back on workers,” said J.J. Patel, a member of Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375 who works at the School Construction Authority.

Astonishingly, when the powers-that-be are clamoring for efficiencies, an unusually high proportion of the staff at the SCA is made up of managers, according to Local 375. “It is outrageous that the specter of layoffs exists when there are alternatives for savings,” said Local 375 President Claude Fort. “Unfortunately, up until this point, the administration appears to be only committed to a slash and burn policy of reducing the front-line headcount.”

In October, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he would restructure the city’s school construction bureaucracies and eliminate 400 positions at the independent SCA and another 200 at the Division of School Facilities at the Dept. of Education. Mr. Bloomberg said the goal of the restructuring is to reduce the cost of school construction from the current $438 per spare foot to $325 or less per square foot.

Besides eliminating management fat, the SCA should also improve efficiency and avoid layoffs by reducing the number of consultants it uses, according to Local 375.

District Council 37 has identified $145 million to $260 million at the Dept. of Education that could be saved by eliminating consultant contracts. The savings are detailed in a report, “We Can do the Work II: ‘Learning for Less,’” which the union presented to city labor relations officials at a meeting Dec. 10 (see page 11 of Public Employee Press, January 2003 issue).

At the SCA, in-house staff can do design work for up to 30 percent less than private architects, the local says. Local 375 attributes the savings to the elimination of the profit factor and expenditures on preparing, administering and monitoring consultants.

Additionally, the better quality of in-house designs (more complete drawings with fewer errors) results in construction firms bidding up to $90 per square foot less on in-house designs, compared to consultants’ designs. This saves millions of dollars in construction costs.

Shoddy consultant work
Members complain that the work of consultants is often shoddy. The consultants know they can rely on in-house experts to determine what corrections to make and then charge extra for altering their original drawings. Local 375 has documented 16 cases in which consultant mistakes drove up the original price of a school design by more than 5 percent over the original budget, leading to more than $25 million in cost overruns.

At the Division of Schools Facilities in the Dept. of Education, Local 375 members have also identified a number of areas in which the department could save substantial sums by eliminating consultants.

For instance, consultants usually charge $20,000 to draft plans and file for a certificate of occupancy with the Dept. of Buildings. In-house architects could do that work for less than half of what consultants charge, saving about $1 million for every 82 projects.

However, DSF now only assigns staff architects to minor projects that don’t require certificates of occupancy.

A veteran employee estimates that the department could save millions of dollars by returning to the old practice of employing enough technical, trades and blue-collar workers to do maintenance work, such as upkeeping boilers, emergency generators and heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. Whereas several years ago, the former Board of Education had a large enough staff to do most of that work, the department now contracts out as much as 80 percent of those jobs, he said.

The Job Order Construction Contracts program relies on a South Carolina-based contractor, The Gordian Group, which has a multi-million-dollar contract for much of the unit’s work, which involves managing school building projects.

The company’s fee for managing projects often runs as high as 18 percent of the cost of contract.

Members say the cost of this work could be drastically reduced by assigning the tasks in-house.