A faulty gas pipeline will be replaced in the summer, which may cost nearly $400,000.
By Knowles Adkisson / The Malibu Times
Point Dume Marine Science Elementary School has been without central heat since October, and the cost to repair a faulty gas pipeline has been estimated at almost $400,000. This news came during the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District’s Board of Education’s meeting last Thursday, during which staff outlined several worst-case scenarios of how the state’s current budget crisis could affect the district’s budget.
Point Dume parent Kristin Mason asked the SMMUSD’s Board of Education members at the Feb. 3 meeting why the school has been forced to use space heaters throughout the winter when the district has known of the aging gas pipeline at the school since 2008.
School District personnel said the pipeline has not yet been repaired due to architectural plans for a new line being delayed by the wait for state approval, and that construction cannot take place while students are present.
Mason, who volunteers weekly at the school, said she learned about the problem “by experiencing first-hand in my son’s classroom how cold it was.” She said she witnessed children leaving their desks during breaks to cluster around the space heater.
The pipeline was shut off in October after it was found to be leaking gas.
Stuart Sam, the district’s director of facilities improvement projects, told the board that construction to replace both the pipeline and the school’s aging furnaces will begin during spring break in late April, stop for the rest of the school year and finish sometime in the summer. Sam said the construction was not possible with students present in the facility because the project requires extensive trenching, meaning the floors would be dug up.
Sam said they have been waiting for more than a year for approval of plans to repair the pipeline from the Division of the State Architect, a state agency that makes sure all school construction projects comply with educational and safety codes.
SMMUSD Chief Financial Officer Jan Maez told The Malibu Times, “We knew we were kind of racing against when this was going to happen, and it happened sooner than we anticipated,” referring to the breakdown of the faulty pipeline.
The cost of repairing the gas line would be paid for with measure BB bond money. Mason told the board that she had spoken with Sam about the issue, who told her that the total construction cost of replacing the pipeline would be about $489,000. Those funds do not include architectural fees for the project totaling $215,000. But Sam told the board that the construction cost for the project was only $150,000.
Sam did not respond to repeated attempts by The Malibu Times to explain the differing projections.
Maez did say that the $215,000 in architectural fees was not limited just to the pipeline issue. The architectural fees included “schematic designs for the entire school as we look to the future of our facilities program. So there was work done by architects that would be out in the future,” she said.
Point Dume staff also faced difficulty in successfully operating more than one space heater in each classroom. Mason told The Malibu Times that one teacher told her that “she couldn’t plug [her space heater] in the front of the room because it would short out the electrical in the room.”
The district upgraded some of the electrical panels in classrooms around the end of December in order to utilize the space heaters and add more than one space heater per classroom.