Progress on a new Mitchell High School continues as the Mitchell School Board on Tuesday approved the bid for construction management services for the project from Puetz Design + Build in Mitchell. The bid proposals were scored based on three criteria: experience, services provided, and costs and fee structure. Mitchell Schools Superintendent Dr. Joe Graves says a committee analyzed the data. “They’re the same firm that provided the construction management services on the Performing Arts Center, so it’s kind of nice to have some consistency on those two projects,” Graves said.
Total cost of the project is expected to be around $35 million. Business Manager Steve Culhane explained how the process works, saying Puetz Construction’s fee would be around 7-7.5 percent of the total expense of the project. The next step is to send out bids to get the total cost.
Graves says taxes will not be raised to pay for the new school. “The district has had a goal for about the last 10 years that we were going to build a new high school in about 2025, and so we’ve been saving money in the capital outlay fund,” said the superintendent. “So that’s one of the ways we’re going do that. And of course we can borrow against our reserves, or against our cash options for the capital outlay going forward. We also did receive some federal dollars, and we’ll be using those dollars as well. At some point we thought we were going to have to go out and do a bond issue, which would have raised taxes, but at this point, we will not have to do that.”
The new high school will be built somewhere on the current campus.