To: Londonderry School Board
From: Dan Black
Date: August 28th, 2023
Re: Moose Hill Building Project Cost Estimate
Last Spring the School Board approved the Architects sending more detailed conceptual designs to the
Trident Group who then worked with three different cost estimator experts to get a budget ready cost
estimate on those conceptual designs.
Last Spring the School Board approved the Architects sending more detailed conceptual designs to the
Trident Group who then worked with three different cost estimator experts to get a budget ready cost
estimate on those conceptual designs.
The Trident Group then scrutinized and evaluated each of those costs estimates from the three different
groups. From that analysis and comparing it to current market conditions, the Trident Group vetted all
those cost estimate to come up with the following overall costs for Phase 1A, Phase 1B, and Phase 2 at
Moose Hill that they were then comfortable sharing with the Londonderry School Board. The Trident
Group would like to note that the budgets below include projected construction costs, projected
escalation to 2025, projected soft costs, design, 3rd party consultants, permitting, and Owner provided
items such as furniture, fixtures, and equipment for the new spaces, IT for the new spaces, winter
conditions and Owner Contingency. 1A includes the loop road (approximately $232/SF), 1B includes the
addition and light renovations within the remaining spaces.
At this point we are just sharing this cost estimate with the School Board. No decisions need to be made
right now.
In terms of next steps, the School Board will need to decide if this project makes it to a future warrant for
the Londonderry Voter’s Approval. Knowing that the scale of this project is much larger than last year’s
Infrastructure Bond – I would recommend we make a decision much sooner than December/January – so
if it does make it to the March 2024 Warrant – there is enough time to explain the project to the
community.
If there are other pieces of information, outside of enrollment projections for the future, that the School
Board needs to know, I think we should use this meeting to surface the additional information needed to
help make the decision.
After we gather all the necessary information the School Board could decide to:
1) Not bring this building project to the voters this March.
There could be many factors that lead the School Board to decide to not bring the project to the voters.
2) Decide to bring the building project as one project solving many problems.
Having one project to vote on will be the easiest plan to explain to the voters. We would still need to
explain that overcrowding and Full Day Kindergarten are two separate issues, but one project on the
warrant basically says – this is the cost to solve Moose Hill’s problems long term.
3) Bring separate warrant articles to the voters that solve the different problems at Moose Hill.
The advantage to this approach is it allows the voters to perhaps choose to fund an overcrowding
problem if they are not supportive of full day kindergarten. The problem with this approach is it will
create multiple warrant articles and will be harder to make clear what we are asking for from the voters.
The other problem is in theory some voters could vote to only solve full day kindergarten but not the
overcrowding problem which we do not have a good plan for at this time.
Obviously, the current drop in kindergarten enrollment changes the dynamic of all the planning that has
gone into the building project up to this point. The current conceptual design was built around a range of
enrollment from 260 to 300 Kindergarten students (with some room to potentially go one or two
kindergarten classrooms higher if needed). Once we have a better grasp on a new longer term projected
enrollment for kindergarten, we could update our assumptions around the conceptual plans to be smaller
in scale as needed.
On the next page are pictures of Phase 1 and Phase 2 just to get a visual of the potential projects at Moose Hill again.
Related Posts
Video: Moose Hill Building Committee, 8/10/2023
The Londonderry School Board is now accepting applications for the Moose Hill Building Committee
Moose Hill Kindergarten Expansion, Phase 1 & 2
New Conceptual Design for Moose Hill Kindergarten in Review