The Geary USD 475 Board of Education found out Monday during a special board meeting that the bids for construction of the new Fort Riley Elementary School have come back $4 million higher than originally expected.

William Clark, the District’s Director of Business Operations explained that Hutton Construction, who was hired to handle the construction of the new school, recently received the bids  from the subcontractors, and the bids are higher than what was expected.

“There’s a couple of reasons for that,” Clark said. “First of all when you look at the proposal that went out two years ago when we applied for the grant, it’s two years old at this point. Life has changed, conditions have changed, material costs have risen, labor costs have risen. Just in the past month of May alone, for example, construction costs have gone up four percent,” Clark said.

Clark went on to explain that the market within the Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska area is saturated with construction which leads to the lack of competition.

“When the construction market is flooded companies don’t have to compete as much to do projects.”

The cost of the school was originally estimated at $20,120,000. The school district received a federal grant worth $16,096,000 with the school district matching $4,024,000.

The $4 million increase came as a shock to the board members and Dr. Anwar Khoury wants some explanations.

“That’s really unusual. We’ve built a couple of schools, and for them to come up 20 percent higher than what was predicted and what was offered by the OHE, that’s kind of a lot of money,” Khoury said.

Khoury asked that representatives from Hutton Construction be at the next Board Meeting in July so that the board can ask them questions and get more explanation.

“We expect them to hopefully be here and give us exactly the details of where the increases are going to.”

The BOE has a couple of options for dealing with the increase, but it depends on if they want to keep the original timeline for construction on track and have the school open in August of 2015, or delay the opening six months to a year.  At this point no final action has been taken on acceptance or rejection of the bids.

The District did recently receive $8.1 million in heavily impacted aid money and the $4 million could be taken out of that immediately, or if they choose to delay the opening of the school, the District could take it’s time and find other ways to cut the cost of construction.