There will be another set of eyes watching over Lehighton Area School District's upcoming building projects.

While not unanimous, the board voted 6-2, with one abstention, Monday night to contract with Quandel Construction Group, a construction management firm, at a cost not to exceed $802,000.According to the agenda item, Quandel will provide management services for "the high school, middle school, elementary center and, if applicable, multipurpose stadium facility improvement projects."If all projects are done, which would include renovations to the middle and high schools along with a new elementary center and stadium, cost projections total around $57 million.Voting to hire Quandel were Gloria Bowman, Larry Stern, Andrew Yenser, Wayne Wentz, Stephen Holland and Lori Nothstein. Opposed were Hal Resh and Rocky Ahner, with William Hill Jr. abstaining.Quandel representatives made several pitches to Lehighton's board, most recently last month, during which they touted their preconstruction and construction phase services including developing a project budget and site management plan.The company will have a full-time construction superintendent on-site for the project duration, managing change orders and providing monthly board updates, among other duties."It's a lot of money, and I would have liked to see things more defined before we entered a contract," Ahner said."The projects are coming up very fast and I don't think we should jump into something before we know what we are getting. We don't even know if we have met stormwater runoff, PennDOT and local requirements that may extend projects beyond the March 2017 deadline. I also want some clarifications on what the architect is doing and what the construction manager is doing. I don't want to pay two people for the same thing."Hill admitted that Quandel's proposal to the district indicates the company would have a "little more due diligence when it came to cost control than an architect would," but had issues with the fact that he only had a proposal in hand."I vote on contracts, not proposals," he said. "Who would vote on a contract without the solicitor coming back with little nuances that are good or bad or evil? We've done that before and it isn't right. I have to protect the people of this district and this community."While some board members had concerns, Lehighton Superintendent Jonathan Cleaver said Quandel comes with positive recommendations by numerous other school districts that used them for building projects.To that same point, Stern said he favored using a construction manager to make sure the district was doing the projects in the most "cost efficient way possible.""They have a better background than we do with this stuff," Stern said. "You can't completely trust the contractor when you're doing these projects."Prior to the vote, during the public comment section of the meeting, Steve Ebbert, Lehighton Fire Company building committee chairman, said one of the best things the department did when building a new fire station was hire a construction manager.While that wasn't Quandel, Ebbert said the firm chosen by the fire company went through the bidding documents line item by line item and was always concerned with the budget."We had a situation where a concrete truck got lost and showed up four hours after the concrete was loaded onto the truck," Ebbert said."Our construction manager looked at the time stamp and said, 'You're not pouring that, go get a fresh batch.' We wouldn't have known that if we didn't have a construction manager down there. You can't rely on one individual."