Palmerton Area School District’s board of directors approved two more change orders Tuesday night totaling $124,066 for the ongoing high school construction project.

The first change order, costing $68,913.30, covers two additional manhole structures and additional stormwater piping, and a second adds $55,152.71 to replace deteriorated stormwater inlets.

At the center of the latest change orders was a 15-inch stormwater pipe, buried 12 to 14 feet underground, that no one knew existed before excavation began. The pipe connected to a 24-inch line and had been draining the school’s inner courtyard for decades with no manhole access and no cleanout point. By the time workers discovered it, the pipe was three-quarters full of sediment, stones and debris.

The two manholes are required to give workers a way to maintain that system going forward. Jay Clough of KCBA Architects said the infrastructure dates to the building’s original construction.

“This particular 15-inch coming to a 24-inch — it’s probably from the ‘60s,” he said. “In the ‘60s, things were different.”

Director Brandon Mazepa voted no for the manhole structures. Every other vote across the two motions was a yes.

Project Details

The project has two components. The first is a two-story addition to Palmerton Area High School that will include a new secured main entrance, five additional classrooms and renovated administrative offices. The second is a new 11,000-square-foot district administration building to be constructed on the west side of the campus.

The board awarded prime construction contracts in April totaling more than $12.9 million: E.R. Stuebner Inc. of Reading holds the general construction contract at $8,931,000; Billitier Electric Inc. of Allentown the electrical contract at $1,764,618; and JBM Mechanical Inc. of Nazareth both the mechanical contract at $1,560,000 and the plumbing contract at $657,000. The district authorized up to $18 million in general obligation bonds to finance the full project, with the target completion date of fall 2027.

Burning through contingency

Combined with the $50,648 in change orders approved at the Aug. 18 meeting, the project has now accumulated roughly $175,000 in additional costs — more than halfway through a $350,000 design and construction contingency that was built into the $14.9 million project budget to cover unforeseen conditions.

“After today, it looks like we are already halfway through that money,” Mazepa said.

Clough did not dispute it.

“That’s probably true, and it’s not surprising,” Clough said. “We would expect most of those unforeseen things to happen below ground, which they are. So it’s not unexpected. Disappointing, but not unexpected.”

Mazepa pressed further, asking whether the contingency would hold.

“I have no way of making any promises,” Clough said. “I hope not. We budgeted what we would hope would be normal.”

Civil Engineer Tighe Meckes of Keystone Consulting Engineers said that before the project began, his team used ground-penetrating radar, used the Pennsylvania One Call system to locate utility lines and had a company attempt to run a camera through the existing pipes.

“The pipes were so full of junk, sediment, stones, the camera wouldn’t even fit the pipe,” Meckes said. “It’s not for a lack of trying. I did everything I could to get the information in the time frame.”

Meckes and Clough both pointed to the absence of as-built drawings, detailed records of what was actually built and where, as a root cause of many of the project’s surprises.

Modern construction contracts require contractors to submit as-built drawings at project completion. That standard was not in place when Palmerton High School was built.

“In today’s world, all of these situations would be documented because we’re required to provide as-built drawings to close out our plan,” Meckes said.

Fall 2027 still the target

The board spent much of Tuesday’s workshop wrestling with a pattern that has frustrated members since August: voting to pay for work that was already completed before it came before them for approval. Clough, however, said the contractor had stopped work and was waiting for the board’s vote before proceeding.

Without approval, he added, winter could arrive before foundations could be set on the west side of the building, which could cascade into delays on the entire project. “The goal is to get enclosed before winter comes so contractors can keep working in winter, so that you get a building to move into in the fall of 2027,” Clough said.

While some directors, including President Sherry Haas said the district is “between a rock and a hard place,” her colleague Danielle Paules offered a detailed defense of the change order process. Before Tuesday’s votes, Paules said change orders are a normal feature of construction on aging buildings and that the board’s job is to evaluate whether each one is necessary, properly documented and reasonably priced.

“We can’t expect contractors, architects, or engineers to see underground before excavating begins,” Paules said. “We can’t expect 1965 drawings to perfectly reflect every repair, modification, utility pipe, conduit, or construction that has occurred over the last six decades, and we can’t pretend that discovering these conditions means someone failed. That is simply not how construction works.”

Clough gave the board new assurances about how change orders will be handled going forward.

“I told the contractor: stop doing work without permission,” Clough said. He added that the board would not be seeing every pending claim either as the design team had already rejected one outright.

“We didn’t think it was fair,” Clough told the board. “So we’ve got your back.”