Last week, Colorado Springs School District 11 (D11) awarded a $4,735,500 contract to RTA Architects, in partnership with NES Landscape Architects and Perkins Eastman, a New York-based firm, as part of the district’s $100 million revitalization of Palmer High School.
“As you are aware the district has facilities that are what you would term ‘aged facilities,’ requiring renovation and investment,” said Parth Melpakam, D11’s board president, during an Aug. 14 work session. “Part of our commitment to having high-quality neighborhood schools is that our students and staff have comfortable, state-of-the-art learning environments.”
Palmer was built by the Works Progress Administration under Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940, and despite numerous expansions since its construction, the existing buildings lack many modern amenities, including air conditioning. According to D11’s informational website for the project, the Palmer renovation is “a transformative initiative that underscores our commitment to educational excellence and community success. By breathing new energy into Palmer High School, we aim to make strategic improvements that will enliven the heart of the building, ensuring it continues to thrive as a vibrant community hub in downtown Colorado Springs.”
Funding for the project will come from certificates of participation (COP), as opposed to bond or mill levy override (MLO) funds. According to D11, COPs are a financing tool that allows a school district to utilize a lease structure and borrow money for capital projects. Districts use COPs when there is a specific revenue stream that can be tied to the capital project. In the case of D11, they are borrowing against district funds from the general fund and MLO Capital Fund.
“The COP is a demonstration of our district’s effort to be as fiscally responsible with our own funds as we possibly can,” said Jessica Wise, D11’s executive director of engagement, in an email. “We want to show the community that we are willing to invest in ourselves and that we are good stewards of our funds. We will come up with every creative avenue to optimize district spending before returning to the taxpayer for a bond.”
In recent years D11’s attempts at securing bond funding have been unsuccessful. “The board in 2021 went for a bond with the community and that Bond initiative failed, narrowly, to gain the necessary community support,” explained Melpakam. “Soon after that in early 2023, with the new board and superintendent in place, there was a renewed commitment to address the facility challenges and come up with a comprehensive strategy for major capital improvements at the district level.”
Norwood Development, others involved in Request for Proposal process
Emails obtained via the Colorado Open Records Act show an Oct. 2, 2023, meeting between D11 Superintendent Michael Gaal, longtime conservative political operative Daniel Cole, and Norwood Development Group CEO Chris Jenkins. The meeting between Gaal, Jenkins and Cole was during the runup to contentious board of education elections, in which dark money group Springs Opportunity Fund spent $144,532 supporting D11 incumbents Parth Melpakam and Jason Jorgenson, as well as candidates Thomas Carey, who also received multiple donations from the Jenkins family during the election, and Jill Haffley. Springs Opportunity Fund shares the same physical address as Cole’s Victor’s Canvassing, which provides paid petition signature gathering for Republican candidates and conservative ballot initiatives, and his political consulting firm, Cole Communications. During the board elections, Joel Sorenson, a Cole employee, served as the spokesperson for the D11 Achievement Alliance, an influential activist group that worked to gin up support for both Melpakam and Jorgenson. That December, Gaal received a personal invitation from Jenkins to attend the Norwood Christmas party at Plaza of the Rockies.
“Our Superintendent receives numerous holiday party invitations from various community groups and attends as many as possible to maintain strong community ties,” said Wise in an email.
Jenkins served on the request for proposal (RFP) selection committee alongside Gaal, other D11 staff members and other community representatives, including a Palmer alum, a downtown arts liaison and Palmer’s student body president. D11 notified 16 firms about the RFP in June. The committee received seven proposals, and then selected four for final consideration: CRP Architects, DLR Group, FBT Architects and the winning team of RTA Architects, NES and Perkins Eastman.
“Every group had some really compelling things to say and they’re all very creative and thoughtful in how they do their work,” said Jenkins during the work session. “Some things were very consistent too. I will tell you that they did not have a ton of time from the time that they were asked to get ready. They had a few days to get ready for the interviews.”
D11 emails show that the district had an ongoing relationship with both Jenkins’ company and Perkins Eastman. In February, Wise met with Jeff Finn, a Senior Vice President of Norwood, and Patrick Davis, a principal at Perkins Eastman, for a meeting described in emails as “Palmer Brainstorming.” Wise, Finn and Davis also met for a Feb. 29 “strategy session,” and then on May 24 Wise, Finn, Davis, Gaal and Jenkins all met for a “D11 conversation.”
Wise said those meetings were not related to the RFP process. “RTA was the contract on our academic support plan, our master plan, which is our, essentially our facilities plan,” she explained during a phone interview. “So how are we going to slowly recapitalize the district over time? How do we prioritize things? RTA brought Perkins Eastman on to that, so they definitely have a familiarity with a lot of the work we do and with a lot of our buildings. That meeting in February was surrounding the academic support plan – What does it take? What does it look like? How do you prioritize investment in a school district as old as ours? That was just really trying to seek some of that knowledge from community builders downtown and what we should be doing and how we should be thinking about it.”
Wise also noted that Davis recused himself from any meetings related to the RFP. “[Davis] did not attend any meetings once we knew that the RFP was going out for Palmer because he wanted to be completely objective in that process,” she said. “I can also say that there were no meetings with RTA or Perkins Eastman that gave them any insight into the RFP itself, how it was going to be run.”
Finn, who was present for earlier meetings with Davis, did have insight into the RFP. On June 27, Finn emailed Wise Norwood RFP materials for use in the Palmer project. “Attached is the evaluation matrix used to select the design architect at the USOPM [U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum]. As you’ll notice, it closely follows the format of their RFP and weighs certain sub criteria differently. Depending on the final version of your RFP – yours could follow suit. Also, my recommendation for selection committee is as follows:
D-11 Reps: 5-7
Board President and/or 1 Board Member Superintendent
Leadership Team Member
Palmer High School Principal
Palmer High School Alumni and/or Student
Community: 4
Community Leader (not associated with the project) – but one with experience on a design architect selection committee / could be a downtowner…
Community Funder(s) – 2
Community Design Professional.”
Wise said Finn’s email was just help from one of D11’s community partners. “We’ve never done anything like this before,” she said. “Especially because Palmer is so situated in the bigger context of downtown, and it’s going to affect a lot of people. We had the mayor there on Thursday talking about how it’s going to affect just the way the city is thinking and operating. [Finn] shared with me how they’ve done things, like for the Olympic Museum, because that was a similar big project, or some of the other City for Champions projects, because he’s been involved in a lot of those, just as a mentor. It was just, ‘Here’s how we have thought through these things in the past,’ and that was just a sharing of knowledge and ideas.”
Despite Wise’s explanation, concerns remain. “Those meetings gave unfair advantage and created undue influence with one team, which is just not right,” said Brian Risley, a principal with CRP, who noted in an email response to the Bulletin’s request for comment that the Perkins Eastman’s fee proposal was nearly $1 million more than CRP’s, “Costing district taxpayers nearly a million more [dollars] for services from an out of state firm.”
[Brian Risley is a current Colorado Springs city council member; however, he did not speak with the Bulletin in his official capacity but as a private individual. — ed.]
RTA, NES and Perkins Eastman will begin their contract by conducting a period of community engagement, with community and stakeholder meetings through December. D11 will issue an RFP for construction firms in September and has provided a website for up-to-date information on the project.
“There are rumors around here about this project,” said Jorgenson during the Aug. 14 board meeting. “We’ve made it pretty clear this evening that we have a website dedicated to all the up-to-date things, so if you’re hearing things about apartments going up, and we’re selling off land to a developer, or whatever it is, we have the website that gives you that piece of information. It is not factual if you’re hearing that we’re putting apartments or buildings – I know Harrison District 2 is building some teacher housing, which is very cool, that was in the news just recently. That’s what they’re doing. We’re not doing that. We’re holding to the values of Palmer’s history, as you heard today in the work session. We’re going to have a page dedicated to true and accurate and transparent information on this project, so if you do have any things you hear at a family barbecue or wherever you’re at, run it by the board and we’ll dispel it and get you what you need to know.”