The original budget for the new North Shelby School was $10 million for a student population of 175. So, Bully and his cronies selected Roger Holland (of Holland and Hamrick) as their architect. Holland and Hamrick have been getting basically all the work for Cleveland County Government, Schools and Cleveland Community College projects for years now. They put out building construction documents that are full of mistakes and go over budget every time by at wide margin. They bill on a percentage so if they go over budget they get paid that much more. Nobody in CCS, the Commissioners and the community college ask any questions.
Architect Roger Holland and a couple others were even given the old Doran Mill property, valued at around $800,000, for nothing by the Cleveland County Commissioners for a so called data center project, which never happened. In the meantime the Doran mill house was stripped of lumber that was then milled into flooring to go into Roger Holland and former county manager David Dear’s NewGrass Brewery in uptown Shelby. Then Holland and his cronies stripped the scrap metal out of the mill property that some say brought in a million bucks to Holland, et al. Then Holland and Co. gave the property back to the county, some believe owing a tax bill. Yet Holland gets all the county work, including the new auditoriums at Burns and Crest High Schools. Go figure. I figure there is some hanky panky going on somewhere in all of this.
In the meantime Bully, without even looking at any options other that building the new North Shelby School on the James Love property, upon the phony advice of Supt. Fisher, gets one of his cronies to make a motion to approve the project and to build the new North Shelby School at James Love. Another of Bully’s cronies seconded the motion and the project was approved with basically no discussion from the school board except from Danny Blanton. Blanton asked the common sense question “Why are we voting on this when we have not looked at anything else?” No matter to Bully and his cronies. Common sense and proper financial management is beyond their skill set.
Bully, Fisher and all the cronies thought everything was a done deal. But problems that should have been looked at before the approval for the new North Shelby School soon started rolling in.
The first problem was the lay of the land at James Love. Deep gullies on the backside would require large volumes of fill dirt that the new North Shelby School would be constructed upon. Many North Shelby School students are wheelchair bound. A wheelchair getting loose on the property would surely result in a wild ride for the student. Serious injury was likely. Just the kind of thing that should have been looked at to begin with.
But, no problem for Bully and his crowd. Money was no problem. Buy the property next door to get the fill dirt so the mountains of dirt necessary wouldn’t have to be trucked so far.
Then a Registered Professional Civil Engineer suggested they do some soil tests to determine if the new property dirt was acceptable to build upon. CCS hired some soil testing engineers out of Hickory and they did some testing on the new property and a few tests on the James Love property where the new North Shelby School waste go.
The soil tests were conclusive. Not only was the soil on the James Love property unacceptable for construction, so was the first four to six feet of soil on the new property. None of the CCS board understood the test reports, except Danny Blanton. Since the dirt issue would cost millions of dollars to fix. Blanton suggested looking at other property where such soil expenses were not so severe. Totally a common sense approach, but Nooooo. Money didn’t mean anything to Bully and his crew. We have plenty of money to spend they said, criticizing Danny Blanton for being so level-headed.
