The westside Gerald Prim Stadium parking lot, the home parking area, has been designated to receive $68,000 worth of improvements to clean, seal-coat and stipe the surface. Sulphur Springs ISD also will continue to contract out lawn work for most district facilities.
Prim Stadium Parking
The Prim Stadium parking lot has had no significant improvements in a quite a while, and it has begun to show. The surface has some cracks, which have grass growing through them, thus the need for the routine maintenance.
“It’s time to take care of that damage. We’ve recently sprayed to kill all of the grass in that area. As you know that’s the parking from Buford Circle to Houston Street on the home side of Prim to the Civic Center. That’ll be sealing all the cracks and resurfacing,” Sulphur Springs Independent School District Director of Maintenance Dan Froneberger said. “It’ll turn out darker than it is now. It’ll be restriped to hopefully gain us another 20 to 30 parking spaces.”
Part of the area to be paved came to the school district from the county, part of a deal a few years back giving SSISD a long-term lease on the Civic Center Auditorium.
“Prim is ours and a portion over at the high school parking lot that is not ours, it was part of the agreement with the Auditorium, that when we redid ours we redid theirs as well,” Sulphur Springs ISD Superintendent Mike Lamb said.
“The school district and county reached an agreement to swap some parking area for some parking space on the high school parking lot. At the high school, if you look at the clock that’s in front of the Civic Center, at an angle back across toward the Dairy Museum on Gladys Alexander, that belonged to the Civic Center, that’s the High School. We had this whole parking lot,” Froneberger noted of the deal struck several years back between SSISD and Hopkins County.
He said SSISD personnel have been in touch with Civic Center Manager Lonnie Fox regarding the planned parking improvements. fox indicated the Civic Center has four-five handicap parking spaces that are “kind of out in the middle of our parking lot.” Those will be moved up toward the county building “because he’s having some parking issues with people parking on his grass, as we did too until we put some big rocks that we had at other campuses. So that will clean up real nice,” Froneberger said.
The district posted notices asking companies interested in the project to submit bids. They received on proposal, from 5W Contracting, LLC, to perform the cleaning, seal-coating and striping of the Prim West parking lot.
Sulphur Springs ISD Board of Trustees, during their regular meeting on July 12, 2021, approved the $68,000 bid from the Sulphur Springs company
Lawn Care Services
Sulphur Springs ISD trustees also at the July 12 meeting approved a bid from a Sulphur Springs business to continue providing lawn care services for SSISD facilities.
Notices asking interested businesses to submit bids were posted last month. SSISD received one bid, from the Sulphur Springs company the district is currently using for lawn care services. East Texas Landscaping & Fencing met all requirements, including insurance and workers compensation, Froneberger reported.
The length of the agreement was increased from a one-year to a two-year contract, with an option to extend it for a third year.
“In the two years, they’ll hold the fee the same, and I believe it was down just a little bit from last year,” Froneberger said. “The principals are happy, and if you’ve seen the work that we’re doing, it’s pretty nice. The only thing that we keep in-house is from Highway 19 back to League Street and the high school complex. As we have retirements, they’ll put that under their umbrella.”
The board members present at the July 12 Board of Trustees meeting voted to award a two-year contract for lawn care services to East Texas Landscaping & Fencing for 2021-2023; the company agreed to perform the service, providing all materials, labor and services for $99,600 a year, which could be paid in increments of $8,300 monthly.
