By ALBERT VILLEGAS
Special to the NEWS
The San Benito Consolidated Independent School District Board of Trustees is still considering financing terms to pay for three Bobby Morrow Stadium projects totaling $2.25 million following a one-month delay.
The stadium lighting, the scoreboard, and track will be replaced, as SBCISD Superintendent Fred Perez said trustees have discussed over the past three months and already accepted bids and vendors (Musco for stadium lighting, Hellas Construction for track, Ace Sports for scoreboard).
But according to Gexa Energy Solutions, there were significant scoreboard discrepancies previously reported at SBCISD meetings by AEP Texas, which is a local electrical utility company.
Trustees were told during the July 16 meeting that, upon further examination, the additional wattage used on a revamped scoreboard would cause havoc to the stadium’s existing electrical utilities, and that the transformer would be overloaded and cause a power outage.
“It’s going to take another two months to have this conversation again, and I don’t want to have this conversation again,” Trustee Orlando Lopez said in an agitated manner to Gexa Energy Solutions representatives. “We’ve already gone this road before; we already got the bids and vendors.”
According to the scope of work previously provided by Gexa and approved by SBCISD trustees, the scoreboard replacement cost is still $1.08 million; the football field show color lighting system $542,757; and the track replacement $598,872.
At the latest trustee meeting, Gexa presented various lower payment options with more than hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings that would still include a low annual percentage rate, but with administrative fees still applied.
Once trustees approve a funding payment plan, the projects could begin within two weeks, but it would take three months to complete the stadium scoreboard, and six weeks for each of the stadium lighting and track, said Sean Davis, Gexa’s director of sales.
He said work would be scheduled around the Greyhounds’ home football games.
Trustees went into executive session for more than an hour and voted unanimously not to take any action on the payment terms at this time.
Upon receiving legal counsel from SBCISD’s attorney during the meeting, it was noted that there was still no updated financing agreement based on Gexa’s latest findings involving the stadium’s lighting capabilities. It was for this reason that the agenda item had the wording that trustees could take action on this item, subject to financing terms and conditions.
“We were going to need to replace the track. It’s run its course, and it’s beginning to be unsafe,” Superintendent Perez said during the trustee meeting. “We’ve talked about the issues we’ve had with the scoreboard and going from the regular lighting we have at the stadium to LEDs.
1 comment
This bond should never have been approved. I know there were undocumented individuals voting because I saw them while I was casting my own ballot. They didn’t even seem to understand how to communicate properly. Allowing them to vote was a mistake, and that’s why the entire process has been so difficult to move forward with—it was flawed and compromised from the start.