By KEN CARPENTER
Great Bend Post
The Great Bend School Board agreed on Monday night to purchase a 33,000 square foot building at 625 East 10th Street to house the school district's maintenance and food service operations. The building, currently owned by Central Power Systems and Services, will cost $1,550,000.
The services that will be moved to the new location are currently housed in about 20,000 square feet in two downtown buildings. Schools Superintendent Khris Thexton said consolidating all the support services into a larger building will make better use of the district's resources.
“We save a lot of taxpayer dollars with the stuff we do ourselves with the staff that we have,” Thexton explained. “So it’s nice to have a facility where we can house them all in one area. This will touch all our kids. Between transportation, grounds, custodial, food service, everyone is affected by this. We can give them a nice facility that can be up to date and do more things for our staff and for our students.”
Thexton estimated that it will cost about $2.6 million dollars to renovate the building, making the total cost of the project about $4.1 million. He said the district's maintenance services will be able to begin moving into the building when the purchase is completed in the next couple of months, but moving the central kitchen from its current location at 2201 Broadway Avenue will take longer.
“We don’t have a ‘for sure’ date on when a completion time will be,” Thexton commented. “With the supply chain issues that we’ve seen just with the boiler replacement we had at the PAC (Panther Athletic Center), that took three months longer than it should have. That was just strictly not getting the stuff you needed. So, I don’t know what an undertaking like this is going to do. We’ll just have to play it by ear and hope we get lucky.”
About 50 district employees will be affected by the move. The building became available when Central Power recently moved to Garden City.