Grant money comes with strings attached
For over a decade, members of the Annandale North Public School community have been campaigning for funds to build a new hall for the school’s 370 students. So when it was announced that the school had been awarded $2.6 million under the Federal Government’s ‘Building the Education Revolution’ (BER) program, they were naturally delighted.
But members of the school’s hall committee have expressed doubts about the management of the construction process for the new hall.
To speed up the delivery process of new school buildings under the BER, the Government has appointed managing contractors to oversee the construction of new school infrastructure.
The managing contractor for projects in Sydney, including for Annandale North Public School’s hall, is construction company Abigroup.
Jean Stuart, the convener of the school’s hall committee, said that said she is concerned that Abigroup will not appoint the designer of the new hall, Juliet Churchill, as the architect and project manager for the construction.
“We have been asking them since the 30th of August to allow Juliet Churchill to tender,” she said. “The last thing we want now is for her not to be given the proper process and not be allowed to be the architect.”
Ms Churchill, who runs architecture firm Churchill Child Partnership, has been working on the design of the new school hall since 2006. She designed a proposal for the hall for free and also prepared the drawings for the NSW Department of Education to submit to the Federal Government as part of the BER.
“The Department of Education commissioned me and my company directly to develop three out of the five most difficult constrained schools in the Sydney area,” Ms Churchill said.
Those schools are the Annandale North, Rozelle and Darlinghurst public schools.
But Ms Churchill said that the appointment of an architect to develop the hall, based on her plans, was now in the hands of Abigroup, which could award the design development and project management to any company it wants.
She said the danger is that Abigroup will award the contract to a large architectural company with which it has already reached a deal to develop large number of schools, possibly Crone Partners Architecture.
“The problem is they don’t have knowledge of the constrained sites,” she said. “So the Department and the schools would rather the original architects who know the schools intimately to continue documenting it.”
Ms Churchill said she had spoken to Abigroup and was told that they were considering appointing her to develop the Annandale North school hall as the result of pressure applied by the school.
“But just because I put a tender in doesn’t mean they’re going to accept it,” she said.
“I was told I was going to hear by Friday, but we didn’t hear on Friday.”
She said the appointment of an architect is “not on a merit basis, it’s on who tendered the cheapest price.”
If Ms Churchill does win the contract for Annandale North from Abigroup, she said she will have less than two weeks to design the drawings on which builders will base their construction tenders.
“So with every day that goes past, providing those documents becomes more difficult,” she said.
From the school’s perspective, the appointment of Ms Churchill as architect is the “only acceptable thing,” Ms Stuart said. “Wouldn’t it be a much smoother, more acceptable process to have the architect who has been working on the project since the word go; has been liaising with the teachers and the students and so knows what they need, is an award-winning architect and is the choice of the school community?”
Ms Stuart said the school was “very happy” that it would be receiving a hall, “but we just want to make sure we get the architect who designed it following-through and project-managing.”
Abigroup failed to return requests for comment on the development of the school hall.
In a note on the school’s website, principal Dawn Artiss said that the construction of the hall should begin before the end of the year and be completed by March 2011.
by Chris Paver
