After lying fallow, in a sense, for several years, the baseball/soccer field at Jefferson Village School is headed for a partial fix after the Jefferson School Committee voted to award a local contractor the job of replacing and reseeding the field’s contaminated topsoil.
According to AOS 93 Superintendent Steve Bailey, the committee voted 4-0 on May 4 to award D.R. Flagg & Son Trucking Co., of Jefferson, the job of removing and replacing the top 4 inches of topsoil in the field, seeding it, and doing the initial fertilization.
A private soil testing firm will be expected to do testing of the new topsoil when it is off-site as well as during the process of delivery and laying it down, Bailey said.
Bailey said he anticipates the work being completed before June 30.
For more than a year and a half, the school committee and district staff have been pursuing a fix for the field.
In the fall of 2013 a visual inspection turned up glass, pottery, metal, and over-sized rocks on the surface of the field, and soil testing found only two of 11 samples taken met screening specifications. Two of the soil samples were found to contain glass.
Glass was also found in the infield material for the school’s softball field, but the material was later replaced and the field cleared for play.
George C. Hall & Sons, of Rockland, installed the fields as a subcontractor for Bowman Constructors, of Newport.
The school committee voted last May to litigate the issue over the baseball field, but, according to Bailey, the issue ended up being mediated through attorneys for the school and Bowman Constructors, as well as through communication with the state’s construction office.
Legal bills for the town regarding the fields started last August, Bailey said. The full cost of those bills, $11,271, was shouldered by the state through the school construction project, he said.
Between himself and AOS 93 Business Manager Kati Hunt, Bailey estimates the equivalent of two months of full-time, dedicated work has gone into addressing the field issues, including phone calls, meetings, visits, communications with lawyers, and document preparation.
Flagg submitted the low bid for the field work, coming in at a total of $42,480. McGee Construction, of West Gardiner, had the next lowest at $67,450, and Damariscotta’s Hagar Enterprises had the high bid of $76,900.
Part of the reason for Flagg’s low bid was because no trucking fees were included in the price.
Darryl Flagg, the owner of the company, said, “I just want to get the kids playing ball.”
Flagg plans to re-screen the loam and use it to grow grass to reclaim part of a gravel pit.
“I won’t be bringing it back [to the school], that’s for sure,” he said.
To pay for the work, $25,000 will come from the contingency for the school construction project, $12,000 will come from general contractor Bowman Constructors and subcontractor George C. Hall & Sons, and the remaining $5,480 would have to come from the school department’s facilities maintenance category, Bailey said.
Only $5,262 was projected to remain in the facilities maintenance category at the end of the fiscal year, according to an April 10 projection.
“Obviously it stretches real thin in terms of what’s available there,” Bailey said.
The bid also does not include replacement of the baseball infield, which still needs to be addressed, Bailey said.
Once both parts of the baseball field are addressed and the work accepted, the construction of the new Jefferson Village School that began in 2010 will finally be complete, according to Bailey.
“In my heart I feel like the contractor should have made good and done the work to take care of the situation,” Bailey said. “That not being the case and having difficulty with that, I feel very good with the effort of the school committee to continue to work to make the situation right, and even better with the desire of the local contractor [Flagg] to help make the situation right.”
According to Kevin Bowman, president of Bowman Constructors, the situation between Hall and the school has been resolved.
“It’s been amicably resolved and we hope the fields are returned to a decent shape and everybody’s happy,” Bowman said.
A call to George C. Hall & Sons was not returned by press time.
