The Federal Emergency Management Agency is reviewing actual bid tabs instead of the insurance estimate for the Hunt campus rebuild, according to architect Taylor Guild III of Eley Guild Hardy Architects.
At the Columbus Municipal School District Board of Trustees meeting in April, Guild told the board FEMA only planned to give the district roughly $1.6 million for the construction on restoring the Hunt campus. The board was seeking $9.8 million from FEMA.
“In the last few weeks, they’ve asked for additional information, and we’ve emailed them everything they’ve asked for immediately,” Guild told the board during its Monday meeting at Brandon Central Services. “What it appears they had done was just taken the insurance estimate and used that to calculate FEMA funding, instead of the bid tab. We took bids of the actual project cost … on the reroofing, the asbestos abatement and building repairs, so at least now they’re reviewing those bids tabs that are the actual cost.”
Guild said pre-COVID there would be an opportunity to sit down and go over the documents with FEMA, which would help the review process go smoother. Now everything is done remotely, which makes the process longer. Trustee Jo Shumake asked if there was any chance district officials could sit down with FEMA at this point.
“Right now they still have three centers they work out of and do things remotely,” Guild said. “I have to go through (Mississippi Emergency Management Agency) to talk to FEMA, so it’s frustrating for me. … I’ll reach out to MEMA again to see if we can’t maybe have some in-person meetings with FEMA.”
Guild hopes an in-person meeting will encourage FEMA to walk through the building, which the agency still has not done. Per the last CMSD meeting, FEMA has only conducted an outside assessment of the building and looked at the insurance estimate.
“That’s all our opinion — they need to get back to normal and come walk through so that they’ll see for themselves that over the years it’s deteriorating also,” board president Yvonne Cox said.
Though there is no timeline of when FEMA will be done with the review, the board will hold a special-call meeting at 5:30 p.m. May 23 in the old boardroom at Brandon Central Services. The meeting will address plans on the Hunt campus rebuild as well as updating the sports complex, including the road area around the stadium.
District maintenance manager Stephen Little will attend the meeting to update the board on the budget for the capital improvement projects. Little said Monday some of the painting and power washing that is needed across the district will happen over the summer.
“We’re holding off on power washing (the outside of some buildings) at the moment because students are testing, and we don’t wish to disturb them,” Little said. “The day after the students are released, though, we will be working on that.”
When it comes to repairing parking lots across the district, Little said the district will not stripe the parking lots until the board decides which lots will be repaved.
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