The cost of building a new school in Tillydrone could shoot up after Aberdeen councillors voted to pause the project and haggle a different price.
The replacement for Riverbank School is currently costing £36.2 million – nearly £10m more than was originally budgeted.
And with the price of construction works being forced up by a whirlwind of crises – including rapid inflation and the war in Ukraine – there are fears it could rise further.
Officers recommended the contract for the second stage of the project should be retendered after the previous multi-million-pound quote to build the school was left to expire.
That suggestion was approved at a meeting of the full council today, along with a raft of other decisions that will delay council house construction and cancel projects such as the Garthdee link road and St Joseph’s nursery expansion.
Target date for project completion now summer 2024
Today’s vote means the opening date for the long-promised school will be pushed back by several months.
Council resources director Steve Whyte said a tender was first returned in November last year, but was not a fixed price.
This meant the local authority was “exposed to unquantifiable financial risk”.
When a fixed price was finalised, he said it was “significantly higher than we expected”.
And because the tender was not accepted within an 11-day period, that price could have risen even further even if the same contractor was picked.
If the council had stuck with that bid, construction would have started in January next year and finished in spring 2024.
But the process of trying to find a cheaper contractor will push those dates back, meaning workers should arrive on site in summer 2023 and complete the job a year later.
Tillydrone School ‘kicked into long grass’
When the new building opens, pupils at the existing Riverbank School will move there while their old building will be refurbished as a replacement for St Peter’s RC School.
Labour councillor Ross Grant, whose children attend Riverbank, said there was no doubt that retendering the work came with risks.
He said: “I think we’re kicking this into the long grass, I think there’s a real risk of that.
“Despite the intentions of the partnership that they are committed to delivering a school, I don’t doubt that, but these people need more.
“The kids of that school and of St Peter’s RC School need more of a specific commitment.”
Liberal Democrat council co-leader Ian Yuill said: “There is no long grass, we will build the school.”
He added: “We are determined to build a new school at Tillydrone, something we all agree about, but we want to ensure that this council and the citizens of Aberdeen get best value.
“It may not come back at a better price, but the advice of our staff is that the prudent thing to do is to test the market and therefore that’s what we intend to do.”
Fate of other major projects decided by council
The new primary school was not the only project which was tackled in the SNP-Lib Dem administration’s motion, which was first proposed at a finance committee meeting three weeks ago.
In an effort to save money as construction costs skyrocket, councillors voted to pause housebuilding at four of the local authority’s sites: Craighill, Kaimhill, Kincorth and Tillydrone.
Plans to expand St Joseph’s nursery were scrapped, despite concerns that parents will have to continue to move their children between sites in the middle of the day.
Officials said the project was unnecessary due to the “surplus of available nursery places in the local area”.
A new Garthdee link road was also officially cancelled in the vote.
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