There’s one word to describe watching the Guilford County Board of Education discuss school construction: excruciating.

Not even the Rhino, which has done the best job of covering the board’s struggle to start building bond projects, has conveyed the board’s apparent lack of understanding of the issue.

At its last meeting, the board got a list of bond projects and recommendations form staff and the architectural selection committee on whether a particular bond project should be construction manager at risk or single prime bidder. GCS Chief Operations Officer Leo Bobadilla explained that the CMR method brings a contractor in during the design phase, enabling him to offer feedback on a particular project from the start, thus reducing costs related to change orders. It sounded plausible, but what do I know about construction?

But then you had two board members, Anita Sharpe and Darlene Garrett, both members of the architectural selection committee, blurt out that it was their belief that CMR was the more expensive method. But what do they know about construction? If they know anything at all, including exactly why CMR is the more expensive method, they did not articulate it. Time was wasted discussing which committee members voted for which method.

I was ready to give Bobadilla the benefit of the doubt, because he did explain CMR clearly and concisely. But then when board member Dot Kearns asked why CMR was more expensive on one project and not another, Bobadilla gave an interesting answer. Put it this way, he told Kearns: the University of North Carolina has been using CMR for quite some time, and if quit working for them, then they would quit using it. So Bobadilla basically wrapped the logic of using CMR based on what UNC does. That doesn’t comfort me.

Maybe Bobadilla was just tired of hearing rambling questions and discussion from the board, and he just didn’t know what else to say. Until I see otherwise, But it’s clear to me that the board knows very little about construction. And we just handed them $457 million to build and renovate schools. And our taxes just went up.