Marshall County Bus Garage To See Upgrades
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MOUNDSVILLE -- A $1.1 million upgrade to Marshall County Schools' bus depot was approved Tuesday evening, allowing improvements to the infrastructure that supports the school district's transportation department.
The low bid of $1,169,469 was submitted by JD&E Construction and accepted by the Board of Education at Tuesday evening's meeting. Facilities Director Mike Price said the project would include repaving much of the lot, which was built in 1987, while also modernizing several aspects of the garage.
One new addition, Price said, was an outbuilding which will be used to store and load salt and cinders for winter roads. The school district gets its salt from the state, which is distributed to Glen Dale, but in the event that the district exhausts its allotment, the new building would allow staff to store - and load - its own salt much quicker.
"I saw the need that we need our own storage facility," Price said Tuesday, prior to the meeting. "Just like this year, the state ran out of salt. We had no salt other than what we buy in bags, that we stored at our maintenance facility.
"We always pre-plan, so by the time August hits, we're ordering stuff for winter. We were fortunate that we bought enough bulk bags - but we had to take them and dump them (by hand) into the trucks," he added. "Now, we're going to be capable of using our machine, picking it up, dumping it in our trucks just like we do at the state facilities."
Price stressed that the storage building at the garage will be used as a backup to supplement the salt allocation from the state.
The project, Price said, consists of numerous, "long-overdue" parts, including paving the lot, some of which consists of gravel, the addition of an automated security gate, and the repair of storm sewer lines which had collapsed over the years. Additionally, cord reel stations, which hold extension cords in a compact and orderly manner, will be installed. Price said that will be a major improvement over the posts containing outlets currently in place.
Work on the project will begin shortly before the end of the school year, starting with the replacement of storm sewer lines, and is set to wrap up around Aug. 12.
As a result of the heavy construction taking place at the garage over the summer, Price said, the district's buses will be kept at John Marshall High School's parking.
"Our bus garage here is a large facility, so we're just modernizing the capabilities," he said. "… What we did last year, at the end of the school year, was re-coating everything in John Marshall ... because, the last day of school, our fleet is going to John Marshall, so we can start ripping it apart."
The project was set to begin sooner, Price said, but was put on the backburner last summer in response to the emergency repairs, cleaning and maintenance required at Cameron Elementary School following heavy rains and flooding in June.
"This was going to happen last year, until we had the flood in Cameron. I had to shelve this project because of the Cameron Elementary flooding," he said. "We're finally able to put it on our docket, get it scheduled. We have it already big, we have a contractor in place to hit the ground running."