It took two years to plan and build, but the Española middle school finally has a new building for its health clinic.
The new building will give staff from El Centro Family Health, a non-profit organization which provides health services in the Española School District, some much-needed space to provide expanded services by the start of this coming school year, El Centro Executive Director Lore Pease said.
Since El Centro began providing health services at the middle school more than five years ago, the middle school’s health clinic has consisted of a small office, a restroom and a 300-square-foot examination room inside the school. El Centro Chief Planning Officer Dan Burke described the conditions at the clinic in a 2006 letter to the School Board.
“We appreciate the space made available at Carlos Vigil Middle School,” Burke wrote. “But truthfully, it is totally inadequate since it was never meant to be used as a clinic.”
The new building includes a waiting room, a conference room, two medical examination rooms, two consultation rooms and a lab.
“It’s not just that we’re moving from that shoebox and into this beautiful new building,” Burke said. “It’s that we’re going to be able to offer the services we offer now, except much, much better.”
The clinic employs two counselors — a social worker and a substance abuse prevention specialist — and a physician’s assistant who offers primary care. The new building includes one office for the counselors and another for medical consultations.
“It’s going to be a lot more comfortable for the students and for our providers,” Burke said.
The new conference center will also allow staff to provide health education sessions, Burke said. That room also features a large monitor that will allow the center to provide long-distance health services. For example, a student who requires a psychiatric consultation could get a consultation with a state psychiatrist in another city, Burke said.
The new facility, a renovated portable building salvaged from the old Sombrillo Elementary campus, cost $180,467 and took two years to plan and build.
Burke emphasized that the delay was the contractor’s fault, not the District’s, the state’s or El Centro’s.
Construction Delays
According to District documents, the contractor responsible for the bulk of the project was GLM Construction, a firm owned by Gene L. Maes, and one that the District hired on a borrowed contract.
Most of the project was funded by a $140,000 grant from the state Health Department, which the District received in early 2006, according to a letter from Yolanda Cordova from the Department’s Office of School Health. The School Board did not approve the project until September 2006, when it also decided the building should have a stucco facade so it would fit in with the middle school building.
By November of that year, the District had spent $14,400 on plans from archtitectural firm Fanning, Bard and Tatum and by January 2007, the state Public School Facilities Authority gave District administrators the thumbs-up to start building, according to District correspondence.
The District paid another $3,506 to Encantado Plumbing in February 2007 to remove a fire hydrant from the southeast corner of the campus, where the clinic would be built, then another $10,880 to Western Structural in April 2007 to haul the building from Sombrillo and install it at the middle school.
District documents show one company, AnchorBuilt, submitted a $223,206 bid for the clinic in April 2007. The District wound up instead awarding the project to GLM, which charged the District $121,881.40, according to payment vouchers.
State procurement law requires the District to seek bids for any expenditure higher than $20,000. But a clause in the same law allows the District to contract services using a contract negotiatied by another goverment agency, a process known as “piggybacking.” The District awarded the project to GLM outside of a formal bidding process by piggybacking onto a contract the County negotiated with GLM, a previous SUN report states.
GLM started working on the renovations — which essentially consisted of applying stucco to the outside of the building and installing partitions on the inside — last July. Although it finished the project in late 2007, the clinic’s opening was delayed for months because GLM did not obtain a certificate of occupancy for the clinic until May 9, District Project Manger Paul Salas said.
GLM’s contract does not provide penalties for not turning a project in on time.
Maes did not return a call for comment.
The clinic is not the only District project that GLM has finished behind schedule. The Board and District administrators took heat from angry Velarde Elementary parents after GLM failed to finish renovations to a portable classroom building in that school before its deadline last Aug. 9, according to a previous SUN report. That project, which housed two fourth-grade classrooms this past school year, was completed in January, Velarde Principal Roberto Archuleta said.
That project, as well as renovations to portable buildings at Española Valley High School and the alternative school at District central offices, was also awared on a “piggybacked” contract. GLM netted a total of $250,000 for the four projects. Maes did not return repeated calls for comment.