Last week both the Crookston School District’s operating referendum and bus garage referendum passed with broad support from voters. Crookston Superintendent Jeremy Olson said he’s thankful to live in a community that supports education. “We’re just very thankful as a district to see that vision come to reality,” said Olson. “Right now, we’ve been in very tentative talks with our architects about our next steps and the work we need to advance as we start looking at making the bus garage a reality. On behalf of the school district and the school board, I want to thank the Crookston residents for their support on both the operating referendum and the bus garage referendum. We’re just very thankful to live in a community that supports education.”
The bus garage will now transition from concept to reality, with Olson laying out the upcoming steps for the project. “Today, myself and Rick [Niemala, Transportation Coordinator] sat down with ICON Architects, and we started hammering out what our next steps are,” said Olson. “Right now, we have to prepare bid specs for our bus garage based on the plans that were set up by our bus garage committee. We have schematic designs, but now we have to translate those into bid specs people can bid on it. First and foremost, if you are a local contractor, we encourage you to work without general contractors available because we want as much local presence on the bus garage project as possible. This is a public bid process that is mandated by state regulations, so we have to pick the lowest possible bidder in the state statute. But we want to make sure there is a lot of local participation because we’d like to see some local companies be a part of building this bus garage. The next steps for us moving forward are putting the bid specs together, setting and publicly announcing the bid window, a bid opening, followed by planning with whoever the successful bid winner is. Looking to break ground, we assume very tentatively at the end of April.”
If everything goes according to the way Olson hopes it will, he anticipates the district occupying the new bus garage in the late fall of 2020.
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