Facilities Department

In a precedent-setting move, Baltimore County plans to hire a program management company to oversee two years of school construction and renovation work -- projects worth about $230 million in state and county funds.The projects are part of a $530 million school improvement program launched last year to fix dilapidated county schools -- 80 percent of which were built before 1970.School system officials, looking to save money and meet deadlines, advertised for bids from program management companies twice recently, said Don Krempel, the school system's director of physical facilities.

Columbia-based Enterprise Foundation has named Terri Y. Montague, a Boston real estate executive, president and chief operating officer. Montague will arrive Sept. 4 to oversee daily operations of the national nonprofit organization, which works to revitalize low-income neighborhoods. She has been a manager with Lend Lease Real Estate Investments and its predecessor, Boston Financial. She also consulted for Boston's public facilities department while doing graduate studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bel Air High School emerges victorious in the Great Can Clash of 2011. The event was a recycling competition between Bel Air and C. Milton Wright high schools to see which could collect the most aluminum cans in a month. The competition was a joint effort between the two schools, the facilities department and the resource conservation manager. The goal was to promote recycling in the schools and communities for environmental awareness. Each school provided a teacher sponsor and two teams of students.

A report of smoke coming from the roof forced a brief evacuation of Southampton Middle School in Bel Air Tuesday. Around 2:30 p.m., the Harford County 911 Center dispatched fire equipment to the school in the 1200 block of Moores Mill Road to investigate a report of smoke coming from the roof. The Bel Air Volunteer Fire Company responded; however, the first emergency responder to the scene reported no fire or smoke evident upon arrival, according to monitored broadcasts. Meanwhile, students and staff were evacuated and stood outside in the warm afternoon sunshine, while a fire crew climbed around on the roof but found nothing.

A SCHOOL BOARD is supposed to be close to the people, but it hasn't seemed to work that way in Baltimore County for a good while. Board members have been a furtive bunch, their public meetings often a formality, their decisions on matters of substance hammered out in the comfort of a locked room. If they have had the best interests of children at heart -- which is likely -- the public has not always been aware of it because they have shared so little. They have tended to treat the public as if it either doesn't need or have a right to know what the board is up to.His assets and contributions notwithstanding, board President Calvin Disney, who announced his resignation recently, endorsed the board's move in that unfortunate direction during the 10 years he has served on it.He rarely offered an unrehearsed comment.

The Baltimore County Board of Education, in an effort to meet school repair and renovation deadlines, has approved a $6.3 million contract with a Texas company to manage work projects at about 45 schools during the next five months. The contract includes an option that would allow the board to extend the contract with 3D/International Inc. of Houston to cover another 12 months of school construction, said Donald F. Krempel, director of physical facilities. "This contract will allow us to complete this program within the schedule originally anticipated," Krempel said yesterday, referring to a plan to have work at 45 elementary schools completed by summer 2001.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- The state of California mailed a check for $37,628,740 to Orange County more than two weeks ago.No one has seen it since.The check never appeared at the county public facilities department, where it was intended to begin paying the state's share of $1.3 billion in improvements needed to forestall a catastrophic flood along the Santa Ana River.State officials stopped payment on the waylaid check and today will give the county a new one.The glitch, it seems, was a matter of mistaken address.

At 2 p.m. on Friday, the chimes in the tower of the historic Harford County Courthouse rang out just once. At 3 o'clock, they tolled only twice. Had a time warp mysteriously descended upon the county seat? In fact, county facilities workers got a jump on adjusting the chimes in the 1858 building on Courtland Place, in advance of the end of daylight-saving time, which expired at 2 a.m. today. No one was up at that early hour fiddling with the chimes because other chores needed to be done over the weekend by county workers, mainly electrical maintenance work at county buildings.

A week after emptying four portable classrooms at Mount Airy Middle School for fear that mold might be making teachers and children sick, Carroll County school officials announced yesterday that they will begin inspecting all 119 of the school system's relocateable classrooms for signs of similar water damage. "Having in hand the knowledge of what's behind those walls and above those ceilings in units of this vintage, we're going to be looking at these classrooms with a critical eye -- a more informed eye -- based on what we found at Mount Airy," Raymond Prokop, the school system's facilities director, said in an interview yesterday afternoon after a meeting between the school board and county commissioners.

A Harford County man has been charged in connection with a series of threatening e-mails to school officials and local and state politicians. Police issued an arrest warrant yesterday for Douglas Andrew Kukucka, 42, who worked in the facilities department of the Harford County school system until he was fired in 2002. Kukucka allegedly sent e-mails to officials accusing the school system of conspiring to conceal environmental hazards, police say. An e-mail to a Baltimore TV station last week alluded to a pending school "massacre" in Harford County.