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Mooresville’s next school will cost about $15 million

Megan Pillow | .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) | March 21, 2006

It appears that Mooresville’s newest intermediate school will cost about $15 million.

Bids for Coddle Creek Intermediate School, which will be built on Kistler Farm Road, were opened Wednesday by the Mooresville Graded School District.

LeChase Construction Services, LLC put in the highest bid at $15,547,000 and Sorenson Gross Contractors, Inc. came in second at $15,264,900. Beam Construction Company had the lowest bid at $14,926,300.

The MGSD Board of Education is expected to discuss the bids at its monthly meeting on Monday.

The bids were $2.5 million higher than the final price tag for the MGSD’s newest school, which opened last August. East Mooresville Intermediate began construction in 2003 and cost $12.5 million to build.

Karen Hart, school board chairman, said that there might be good reason for the increase. She said this region has a glut of construction projects, which means that demand for construction is on the rise, and skyrocketing fuel costs means that it is now more expensive to do everything from drive machinery to deliver supplies.

“I feel like gas prices have a lot to do with (the bids) that are coming in right now,” she said.

All three companies vying for the Coddle Creek project have considerable experience in large-scale construction. LeChase Construction, based in Rochester, N.Y., has four branch offices in New York and North Carolina. The company has built headquarters for Bausch and Lomb, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and Lockheed Martin.

In Charlotte, LeChase built Highland Mills Montessori School, Irwin Creek Recreation Center, and part of the trolley/light rail line that runs through the Charlotte Convention Center.

Sorensen Gross has corporate offices in Flint, Mich., and Charlotte. The company built a water treatment plant for the city of Fenton, Mich., the William S. White Professional Studies Building at the University of Michigan-Flint, a historic courthouse in Flint, and construction projects in Egypt, Jordan, and other countries.

Beam Construction, based in Cherryville, N.C., built the UNC Storrs College of Architecture, the southwest campus for Central Piedmont Community College, Forestview High School in Gastonia, and the Morris Library at Gaston College in Dallas, N.C. the compnay has also constructed churches, police departments, and industrial buildings.
In the bidding process here, the three companies were also given the opportunity to enter 10 additional bids on alternate projects for the school. The projects included features like retractable gymnasium bleachers, four-classroom pods, terrazzo flooring, and an automatic temperature control system. The addition of these 10 features raised LeChase’s bid to $16,862,000, Beam’s to $16,272,104, and Sorenson Gross—which only bid on nine of the 10 – to $16,577,500.

Coddle Creek Intermediate will be build near the present Mooresville Intermediate School, which will be converted to a middle school, according to the MGSD’s long-range facilities plan.

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