Tim Armstead – Staff photo by Rusty Marks
By: Jake Jarvis | Posted: May 25, 2018 | Source: WV News
CHARLESTON — House of Delegates Speaker Tim Armstead has called on state and local officials to speed up the process for rebuilding a handful of Kanawha County schools destroyed in the June 2016 flood.
In a letter dated Wednesday, Armstead, R-Kanawha, asked several officials to review the timeline for rebuilding the schools.
“As you are aware, students in this area have been through a tremendous ordeal, and it is essential that we provide them access to completed classrooms as soon as possible,” Armstead wrote.
Armstead sent the letter after hearing a presentation from the state School Building Authority during an interim meeting of the Joint Legislative Committee on Flooding earlier this week. He included a copy of part of the presentation in his letter.
The letter was addressed to a regional administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the state superintendent of schools, the executive director of the School Building Authority and the cabinet secretary for the state Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety.
“It is essential that we make every effort to complete these schools as soon as possible in order to eliminate any further negative impact on the education of our children due to the June 2016 flood event,” Armstead wrote. “I would also request that you notify my office if the Legislature can be of assistance in streamlining the process for completion on these buildings.”
The presentation addressed the new Clendenin-Bridge Elementary School and the new Herbert Hoover High School. The former is expected to be completed by the fall of 2020, the documents show, while the latter won’t be completed for another year.
“We totally agree, and we’ve been pushing since we got started to move these processes up,” said Ben Ashley, the SBA’s interim director of architectural services. “The problem we’re finding is, unlike a traditional SBA project, there are so many hoops you have to jump through.”
Ashley said the presentation Armstead referenced was actually the worst-case scenario of what could happen. He said the SBA didn’t want to provide an earlier estimate to lawmakers and then not deliver.
Besides needing to jump through federal hoops to work with FEMA, Ashley said there is a surprising new hoop the projects might have to get through. A certain kind of bat, called the Indiana bat, is endangered and has been spotted in the area.
Federal wildlife officials are going to complete a study to see if they are actually these type of endangered bats in the trees for the site construction. If they are present, Ashley explained, federal regulations will prevent crews from removing the trees between the months of March and November.
Besides bats, Ashley said the SBA would be doing everything in its power to streamline the process. But at the end of the day, the work can only be completed so fast.
Earlier this week, a handful of SBA members didn’t want to vote on awarding a contract to demolish the old Herbert Hoover High School, but Ashley said that shouldn’t slow down the process for building the new schools.
“We totally share their frustrations,” Ashley said. “While the public might be upset now, we’ve been upset for months and months trying to push this process forward.”
Jake Jarvis can be reached by phone at 304-935-0144, on Twitter at @NewsroomJake or by email at jjarvis@statejournal.com.
