The Joint Schools Construction Board (JSCB) met on December 18, 2025, to review progress on the Phase Three school reconstruction program, approve routine resolutions, and honor Mayor Ben Walsh for eight years of service as chair. All board members were present except Derek Carr (excused). Key updates included responses from the New York State Education Department and Office of State Comptroller on the comprehensive plan, the selection of architect/engineers via RFP, and the timeline for a project labor agreement feasibility study.
Note: No public comments were made during the meeting.
Thank you. Hopefully, Derek can join us. But I'm going to go ahead and call the meeting to order. I will note that all board members are present with the exception of Derek Carr, who we expect may join us shortly. Otherwise, as excused, and we will move to the first item on our agenda, which is the minutes from November twentieth, twenty twenty-five. I'll entertain a motion to accept the minutes. I think I have good news in general about the progress of phase three. On the comprehensive plan, we received feedback from the New York State Education Department and JSCB staff and Turner are going to um work on re responses to their questions today. Likewise, I believe we're expecting today comments back from the Office of State Comptroller. Right. So that's a good sign of progress, and we will respond to those as well. Good. The uh next thing up is we've made good progress with the RFP process for the architect engineers. As you know, mayor, you approved uh the candidates selected by the RFP committee. Right. And uh we'll now move to the process of negotiating uh contracts with them as to the uh price of the services and the contract language, and then hopefully uh assuming our comprehensive comprehensive plan is approved because we need to have the financing secured, we will bring those contracts to the board for approval early next year. So that's moving along. And and finally, uh JSCB staff in Turner met with our project labor agreement attorney and consultant uh last week, I believe it was. We have made good progress on finalizing the PLA feasibility study, and we hope to present that to the board in January. Is the feasibility study a condition for the actual agreement? It is, it's a state law requirement. So it's uh the the board has to do a study uh showing that by using a PLA there will be cost savings for the project. Gotcha, and that becomes the basis for the authorizing the PLA. Okay. Of course, we'll we'll have to negotiate with the trade unions on language. We're hopeful because we had phase one and phase two PLAs that we can pretty much continue very similar documents, minimizing the the time to put it into place. Good. And uh that completes my report. All good updates. Thank you, Joe. Any questions for Joe? Thank you. Okay, great. Thanks. Well, we will move on to our program manager report. Good morning. Morning. Um as Joe mentioned, we we did receive comments back from state ed on the comprehensive plan. We're in the process of working through response to those comments. We've got a draft together and we're gonna review those after the meeting today and hopefully get something out before the end of the year to them. Um OSC. You'll and then uh get them out for the get it back from the end of the year. I didn't hear the last one. Uh sorry, we're gonna try and get the responses to their questions out by the end of December. Which we anticipate probably either by the end of this week or very first part of next week. Not sure if we'll get responses from them before the end of the year. Was that hopeful? Yeah, were there any surprises in the um no? There were really just uh clarifications looking into um local share um estimated scopes within the comprehensive plan. Uh a little bit more detail they were looking for.