The Elma School District is one major hurdle closer to construction of a long-awaited and much-needed transportation center.
In mid-January, the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) signed off on the district’s proposal to build a transportation co-op that would serve the vehicles of the district and those of other districts and agencies throughout the region.
“We’re depending on the Legislature now to put the money in,” said Tom Boling, Elma School District’s transportation director.
Preliminary figures show the project — called the East Grays Harbor Transportation Cooperative — costing just more than $3.32 million with the state funding a majority of the cost. But the state will fund only certain aspects of the project, meaning actual costs likely will be higher and, when completed and operational, the district could fund somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the final cost, according to Boling and district Superintendent Howard King.
“We’ve set aside $1.5 million,” King said. “It’s taken four years to save that. We scrimped and saved, and the reason we did that, is that we had this on a bond two times and failed both times. And the need is huge.”
Currently, the district’s transportation center is housed at the former site of the Hunters Prairie School. Buses park in a muddy, gravel lot. The two-bay shop is housed in the generations-old former school gymnasium. Offices are located in a cramped, aging modular building and the only restroom facilities for staff and drivers are outhouses on either end of the property.
“We’ve had ‘sani-cans’ out there for three years now,” King said. “It’s ridiculous. … So the need kept growing and we figured we’ve got to get it done. So we’ve been working our tails off to save money.”
The new cooperative will service buses and other vehicles from the Elma, McCleary and Oakville school districts, along with more than 20 buses and vehicles from Education Service District 113, located in Olympia. Its main features will be a 14,000-square-foot building with four service bays, a bus-washing bay, offices, restrooms, parking for scores of vehicles and room for expansion, if need be. There are 42 buses among the three school districts.
“You take the total number of buses and we qualified for the minimum size, which is 13,986 square feet,” Boling said, noting that OSPI would not take into account the ESD 113 buses because it is not a school district.
“ESD 113 will have some buses with us, too,” Boling said. “OSPI would not count those buses. We tried to argue that point, because we would have qualified for more square footage, but they wouldn’t go for it.”
But ESD 113 will still contract with the cooperative, King said.
“We’ll take care of servicing all their buses, and they’ll probably house their buses out here during the summer, so we’ll be really busy during the summer months.”
All that preventive maintenance and servicing will require the district to hire more workers, King said, including at least one new mechanic.
Should all go well with legislative funding, Boling said the estimated date to put the project out to bid would be some time this July, with groundbreaking hopefully in August. The project is estimated to take eight to 10 months of construction.
Boling, who started as a diesel mechanic and has been with the district for 33 years, expects other neighboring school districts or government entities may also choose to use the facility for vehicle maintenance and repairs down the road, so he said there is room for expansion should the need arise.
“I wanted it designed so it’s easily added onto,” he said of the facility. “We want the building designed so it can be easily expanded, because I think this is going to grow and possibly some other surrounding school districts may join. That’s one of the things we wanted, because I’ve seen so many things happen when you don’t plan ahead. When we first started talking about this I said, ‘Whatever we come up with in a design, I want it so we can add on to it and not go to the big expense of having to tear everything down to redo it, so if we do grow, it’s not such a big expense.’”
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