School Board gets refund over error

Oops. Someone made a math error, or two.

That's why the Alachua County School Board will be getting a refund of $15,368 from the Ocala company that recently replaced four high school gymnasium floors.

According to district records, in August 2006 the School Board approved having the identical maple gymnasium floors at Buchholz and Eastside high schools replaced by All American Athletic Floors Inc. of Ocala. The board was told by its staff that each gym had 11,000 square feet of wooden floor space and that the cost would be $77,607 for each floor.

At the suggestion of All American officials, the district agreed to use a combination of the highest and second-highest grade of maple instead of just the highest grade of the hardwood, which had typically been used for gym floors.

"It wound up costing us way below what we thought it was going to cost," said Ed Gable, director of facilities. "We thought it was going to be in the $125,000 to $150,000 range per school. Because it was less than we had budgeted for, we were able to replace the wood floors at Gainesville and Santa Fe high schools, too."

Gainesville High's gym floor covers 8,700 square feet and the gym at Santa Fe High covers 8,500 square feet. Invoices show that the district paid All American $61,639 for the Gainesville resurfacing and $60,251 for the work at Santa Fe.

About a month ago, rumors began circulating that the Buchholz and Eastside gym floors covered 9,900 square feet, noticeably less than the 11,000 square feet the district had paid to have resurfaced. Rumors also began circulating that a coach may have had the excess maple flooring installed in his home

Gable said a member of his department brought the situation to his attention about a month ago.

"We went out there with tape measures to make sure and we got with our purchasing department and then we sat down with the contractor, (All American) to talk about this," Gable said. "We think this was an honest mistake on the part of the contractor."

Company owner Tom Reid told The Sun on Thursday that the estimator who initially determined the gym floor sizes is no longer working for All American. Reid said he was also concerned about whether a coach really had taken excess materials for personal use.

"I talked to my crews and they told me that they took a pallet (of flooring wood) from each of those high schools back to our warehouse," Reid said. "We also checked about the coach's flooring and what he has in his house is not ours."

Gable said Reid's firm has done everything it could reasonably have done to correct the error and will be allowed to bid on future district projects.

"These kind of things don't happen very often and this one wouldn't have happened if we and the contractor had checked things out more closely," Gable said. "We certainly don't think there was any effort to deceive anyone. This just appeared to be an error in estimating."

The $15,368 repayment may be used on other gymnasium projects, possibly at middle schools, which have composition rather than wood floors.

Karen Voyles can be reached at 352-359-5656 or kvoyles@gmail.com.