The Guthrie Center School District is finetuning their fitness center addition project after their bids came in over budget last month.

At their recent meeting the School Board approved a resolution appointing the paying agent, bond registrar, and transfer agent and authorized the terms of issuance and providing for and securing the payment of School Infrastructure Sales, Services, and Use Tax Revenue Bonds valued at $1.2 million for the project. The lowest bid they received was of $1,505,440 from Sande Construction, and Superintendent Dennis McClain says FRK Architects is working with the contractor, “So the bids came in higher than we thought they would and so we’re working with the lowest bidder on some value engineering, things that we can, again, do a little bit differently but not change necessarily the total scope of the project just to bring the cost down a little bit. And so we’re just waiting for the architect and the contractor to work through some of those things and get us some hard numbers on that to continue moving forward.”

McClain says he expects a special meeting to be held in the next couple weeks for the Board to officially award the contract for the project, which they hope to break ground on in May for a late fall completion.