October 25, 2019

Garco gets $65M contract that razes Spokane's Joe Albi Stadium

Photo from Spokane Public Schools [enlarge]

Joe Albi Stadium and its 20-acre parking lot will be replaced with a smaller stadium and middle school.

Spokane Public Schools' board on Wednesday approved a general contractor/construction manager contract with Garco Construction that gets the ball rolling on the demolition of Joe Albi Stadium.

Replacing the aging stadium, lumped in the contract with a new middle school, is part of a group of major projects that are being funded by a $495.3 million bond measure passed a year ago by Spokane voters. Garco's work is estimated at nearly $65 million.

Mark Anderson, associate superintendent of capital projects and facility services at Spokane Public Schools, said the stadium is near the end of its life (it opened in 1950) and has nearly 30,000 seats, which is way too many for the high school and middle school football games played there.

Plans call for building a new 5,000- to 6,000-seat stadium in place of Joe Albi and the middle school in the old stadium's adjacent 20-acre parking lot along Wellesley Avenue. The entire 43-acre site is adjacent to Dwight Merkel Sports Complex.

Anderson said the stadium will be built first and the overall project could be built in phases. Stadium construction could start next summer and finish a year later. Work on the 135,000-square-foot middle school is scheduled to start in spring 2021 and finish in fall 2022.

The budget for the middle school is $66.9 million, with a maximum construction cost of $42 million. For the stadium, the budget is $35.2 million and the maximum construction cost is $22.7 million.

Anderson said they want Garco, as part of the GC/CM process, to provide early input on things like on constructability, design and site preparation. ALSC Architects is doing master planning for the stadium; an architect for the middle school hasn't been selected yet. A stadium committee is also guiding design.

District officials are in the process of selecting a civil engineer for the site and expect to recommend an architect for the middle school by Dec. 11 to the school board.

Anderson said the bond measure is the largest issued in Spokane's history and ties into a $77 million city library bond approved on the same ballot. The school bond will fund construction of six middle schools, a renovation and addition to Lewis and Clark High School, a classroom addition and replacement gym at Wilson Elementary, and the new stadium.

After the bonds were approved, the school district and city of Spokane then swapped properties for some of the projects.

The district traded a site it owns on Sprague Avenue adjacent to Libby Center so the city can build a public library there, and allocated space on the Shaw Middle School campus to build another library. Shaw is one of three middle schools being replaced under the bond program — the other three are new.

In return, the district got a site on North Foothills Drive in the Logan neighborhood that the city used to sort dirt on and 16 acres in the South Hill area. The district plans to build new middle schools on both sites.

Part of the land exchange includes a provision allowing the city's Parks & Recreation Department to use district middle school gyms and fields for after-school programs for kids and adults.

“Not only is it an asset for Spokane Public Schools, but we want it to be a multi-use facility,” Anderson said. “It's an important community project.”

Garco is also building the improvements at Lewis and Clark, with NAC Architecture as the designer.