The new Captain Johnston Blakely Elementary School will cost $6.7 million more than the amount that the Bainbridge Island School District asked voters for in its 2016 capital projects bond.

Bainbridge Island School District officials said part of the budget gap will be covered by dipping into essential renovations funds. At a study session late last week, the school board approved shifting money from bond measures passed in 2006 and 2009 to pay for the new school.

When the district went to voters in November 2015 with an $81.2 million bond package for the new school, which included funding for the new 100 Building at Bainbridge High, officials set a price tag of $38.9 million for the new Blakely.

The estimate for the project has now climbed to $45.6 million, prompting district officials and those involved in the project to cut back costs to bring its budget in line with the 2016 bond request, plus the additional funding that could be shifted from other parts of the district’s budget.

Money from the Essential Renovations Fund is used for miscellaneous improvement projects district-wide.

In the 2009 bond, the school district requested $9.4 million from voters to help replace worn out roofing, improve mechanical systems and assist with other necessary renovations costs. In 2016, the district again asked voters to approve a bond which would allocate $12.2 million for similar expenses.

Now, a total of $5,132,368 has been reallocated from those bond measures and added to the budget for the Blakely Elementary construction project.

Roughly $2.57 million of the allocated funds will be set aside as a contingency fund and will not be spent without prior board approval.

District officials noted that essential renovations will continue to occur throughout the district but there will not be any additional room for extra renovations.

Officials pointed to an earlier estimate of the new Blakely when announcing the higher project costs last week. District officials noted an estimate in a 2015 master plan estimated the new school’s cost at $45.5 million.

Tamela Van Winkle, the district’s director of capital projects, said the district didn’t seek a higher bond amount in 2016 because it expected other funding sources could be tapped to pay for the new Blakely.

“We knew that it could possibly cost more money, but we also knew that we had other available resources to draw from,” Van Winkle said.

According to Van Winkle, the district had always planned to use funds from the previous bonds to pay for the new school. However, that gap widened.

Rapid expansion and constant construction in Seattle has driven the cost of materials and labor up.

According to Van Winkle this cost escalation was responsible for the estimated cost of the project increasing by $164,352. While a relatively small increase compared to the total estimated cost, the project experienced other setbacks which lowered the budget, as well.

In calculating the available funds for the project in 2016, the school district made assumptions about available state funds which would bring in about $4 million.

However, a class size reduction grant sought by the district was later denied. The grant would have gathered $1.26 million for the project’s budget. A state matching program — which would have nabbed an additional $3.8 million for Blakely — was also reduced to $2.25 million.

The loss of state money, the increase of resource and labor costs and the passing of new low impact development (LID) standards in late 2016 by the city of Bainbridge Island all worked to raise the cost of the project.

District officials said by making cost reductions now, in the design phase for the new Blakely, project designers and architects were able to identify areas where savings can be made by selecting less expensive materials and design options. According to Van Winkle, these sort of cost-effective changes are not unique to the Blakely project.

“It can be a little confusing when you hear, ‘We adjusted this, we changed that, we looked at that, we took it away, we added something we couldn’t afford.’ That is what every single project goes through. This building is no different from any other building we have all worked on,” Van Winkle said.

By reworking the project’s landscaping, paving and other site development costs, architects estimated a savings of $1 million. An estimated $441,048 will be saved by using tectum ceiling panels instead of the original wood ceilings. Another $405,000 will be saved by utilizing fiber cement board for the construction.

By making these sorts of cost reductions the district will save an estimated $3.9 million.

That still leaves the budget about $5.1 million short of the 2018 cost estimate. It is for this reason that the district will be reallocating money from the essential renovations fund, but it is not a guarantee that the district will need to spend all of the reallocated funds.

“When we did Wilkes, we had essential renovations money in the 2006 request and we tried not to spend it,” Van Winkle said.

About $2.5 million of the allocated money must be kept as part of a legal requirement by the state, ensuring that the project will have enough money to cover unforeseen costs.

With the unanimous approval by the board of directors to reallocate renovation funds, the budget for the new Blakely has been realigned with the estimated costs.

Construction on the project is expected to begin in early 2018 and based on early estimates, the project is expected to finish in the Summer of 2019.