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Editor's note: A guest column from the Moffat County School District superintendent

Courtesy photo

Pete Bergmann

Craig — In an effort to clarify some of the misunderstanding surrounding the discussions between the Moffat County School District and the city of Craig regarding additional gym space for the community, I would like to share these points.

Though Moffat County School District would benefit from a larger gym, we do not need additional gym space to deliver our physical education curriculum. We have designed and will build a more than adequate gym space for our physical education staff and middle school students to use.

The Moffat County School Board simply presented a gym expansion proposal to the City Council as a rare opportunity to meet the critical need for additional gym space in the Craig community.

We respect the City Council's decision to not move forward with the funding of this gym expansion. We do not pretend to understand the complexity of the city budget or the capital needs of various city departments. The council and city staff are faced with numerous needs that only they have the insight and expertise to evaluate and prioritize.

We would like the public to understand the often referred to changing cost of the gym proposal.

The bottom line is that The Neenan Company, the archistruction company presently employed by the school district, originally submitted inaccurate estimates of the gym expansion costs.

To quote Mike Daley, executive with The Neenan Company, "Neenan did miscommunicate the additional costs for the 57-foot-by-87-foot gym and apologize to both the district and the city."

It should be noted, the proposal we brought to the city Feb. 24 was for a gym expansion from a 42-foot-by-52-foot gym (original design), to a 57-foot-by-87-foot gym (about the size of the current Sunset Elementary Gym).

The inaccurately quoted Neenan price for this gym was $450,000 to $500,000.

Using this inaccurate but to the best of our knowledge good estimate, we extended this opportunity to the City Council on Feb. 24, stating that we needed a minimum of $150,000 commitment from the city to continue to move forward with this proposed gym expansion.

At this time, we still were exploring other financial partners to make this project a reality. We knew we were $50,000 short but felt confident that by working with other partnerships and with the Neenan Company, we could overcome this $50,000 deficit.

After an initial positive response from the council to this initial proposal, two things happened to inflate the cost of the proposed gym. First, The Neenan Company realized a significant error in their original estimate and the adjusted cost of the (Sunset sized) gym went from $450,000 to $775,000.

The school district had no part in or control of this error.

At the same time Neenan realized its cost estimate mistake, the Craig Parks and Recreation department began to collaborate with the school district and Neenan to ensure the gym expansion design met the needs of the city.

It was determined by the city that the gym size needed to deliver their programs was a 71-foot-by-87-foot gym. This larger gym request by the city further inflated the price of the gym expansion from $775,000 to $890,000.

The school district, in partnership with Neenan, committed $425,000 toward this gym construction and was prepared to ask the Moffat County School Board to commit an additional $100,000 toward this gym expansion.

With the total cost of the gym growing to $890,000, the financial partnership obligation from the city then stood at $365,000.

Ultimately, the City Council's decision was about other needs and priorities identified by the city department heads and council, coupled with the existing uncertain financial times.

I certainly understand and respect their decision to not move forward with this project, but this unique opportunity to build critically needed gym space at this cost will never again be repeated.