McNeill Addresses Group of Urban Mayor, Superintendents & School Board Officials

Trenton, NJ (May 29, 2003) - Al McNeill, NJ Schools Construction Corporation CEO, provided the keynote address today at a conference for urban school superintendents, mayors and school board officials. Thomas Edison State College's John S. Watson Institute for Public Policy hosted the event at their campus on West State Street. This was the 4th annual conference sponsored by Thomas Edison and the NJ Urban Mayors Association. This year's theme was "Building the Partnership" and focused on such topics as collaboration within and between state agencies, as well as locally.

Mr. McNeill discussed the challenges he faced since last July when he accepted Governor McGreevey's invitation to head up the Schools Construction Corporation. He explained how the SCC was reorganized to meet those challenges and the goals that the agency set for itself in order to meet the needs of the client districts and ultimately put children behind desks.

First and foremost, according to Mr. McNeill, there had to be a customer service focus. The district, being the SCC's client, needed to be enabled so that kids could be put behind desks through a process that was expeditious, cost effective and safe, while meeting the individual needs of specific communities. Overlapping processes were developed to shorten the timeframe of delivering schools, payments to contractors and districts need to be accelerated and districts had to be granted more input and participation in the process.

The agency's ambitious goals for 2003 include effectuating 100 design procurements, issuing 50 construction notices to proceed, acquiring 40 sites and establishing a program for procurement of furniture. Some key factors that needed to be addressed to make these goals a reality involved matching the size of the staff size to the volume of projects, developing and implementing a more visible communication campaign, creating regional offices, improving Affirmative Action monitoring and establishing a process for alternative delivery systems, such as design-build.

Issues involving programmatic implementation set out by EFCFA were also addressed by Mr. McNeill. They included establishing baseline for sustainability in design and documenting lifecycle costs, community schools and the process for demonstration projects. Issues that have been part of the program not specifically addressed by the enabling legislation, that have subsequently come to the fore were similarly outlines. They included environmental risk assessment and the remediation of contaminated properties, incorporating security, as well as natural disaster planning into school design.

The audience was invited to take part in a question and answer session after the remarks.

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