A staff recommendation to cut off relations with the renowned construction company hired to oversee the modernization of Jefferson High School, a historic landmark of the now-gentrified area that was once the center of the city’s Black community, is being considered by Portland Public Schools board members.
Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong and employees in the school district’s Office of School Modernization suggested ending the district’s contract with Portland-based Andersen Construction in order to rebid the project in a five-page memo obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive and given to school board members during an executive session earlier this week.
District officials admitted that doing so would most likely push back the Jefferson project’s start date once more, perhaps to the summer of 2026, and that hiring a new contractor might not end up saving money in the long term. Nevertheless, officials stated that they think cancelation would be the best course of action.
Considering Benson High’s scheduling delays, cost overruns, and other issuesIf rebidding the Jefferson project results in a new Construction Manager/General Contractor, PPS reasonably expects greater quality of project management and contract execution. District staff wrote in the memo that, despite Andersen overseeing that school’s extensive renovation, PPS has serious concerns about Andersen’s performance in the areas of schedule management/timely completion, cost management, quality, and safety.
Andersen regional vice president Brian Knudsen declined to comment on those allegations in a phone interview on Thursday.
Although a Portland Public Schools representative emphasized that no decisions had been taken, they did confirm the staff advice in the memo.
If the decision were to go to a public vote, only one more vote would be required because three of the seven members of the school board stated on Thursday that they are likely to accept the recommendation. Board members are not allowed to make decisions during executive sessions, according to state law.
Patte Sullivan, a board member, stated on Thursday that she is inclined to switch contractors. I’ve been hearing about issues at Benson for a while, and the staff report convinced me. It appeared that a change was needed. Many opportunities have been presented to them [Andersen].
Her coworkers, board members Herman Greene and Julia Brim-Edwards, stated that they also intended to back the recommendation.
“We should send it back out to see if anyone else can do it for cheaper when the scope changes that much,” Greene said. Andersen Construction Company is unrelated to it. If they acquire it again, it doesn’t matter to me. However, we must send it out again once the scope changed so significantly if we want to claim that we are being fair and that the process was truly competitive.
Four other board members chose not to comment.
The Oregonian/OregonLive reported the memo and board members’ leanings on Thursday. Knudsen stated that the company was unable to comment on the document due to the lack of a copy.
“What we can say is that we are so proud of the work that PPS, the design professionals, Andersen Construction, our trade partners, and the hundreds of skilled trades people did to build the new reimagined Benson Polytechnical High School,” Knudsen wrote in an emailed statement. The school opened on schedule this past fall and gave students a beautiful new place to learn.
As long as it has paid for preconstruction services, the school district is free to fire Andersen at any moment and for any reason under the provisions of the contract. To yet, the district has given Andersen $1.8 million.
In January 2023, the district signed a deal with Andersen to function as Jefferson’s general contractor and construction manager. This model, which the district has used for all of its high school modernization projects, exempts later stages from the competitive bidding that is common to anyone who has requested estimates for a home repair by bringing on a supervising construction firm during the design phase.
The district memo claims that the project was complicated from the beginning. In July 2023, Andersen told the school system that constructing the Jefferson that the community, employees, and students had envisioned—including maintaining the school’s historic facade—could cost up to $500 million.
The district reduced that amount by roughly $136 million through value-engineering. The designers were then forced to start over after a community outcry over plans to relocate pupils to Marshall High School, which was far away, while construction was underway.
In order to allow children to continue attending the current school while work was underway, they devised a plan to construct a brand-new building adjacent to the old one. After that, they would demolish the old structure and replace it with playing fields. Andersen informed the school system that the cost had increased to $490 million after making that change.
An examination of Benson High School’s construction project. Andersen Construction was also the general contractor and construction manager for that project.Portland Public Schools provided this information.
Benson, which reopened in August 2024, was experiencing problems in the meanwhile. Costs increased so much under Andersen’s leadership that the district had to use $165 million in 2020 bond funds to complete the project.
The statement sent with school board members stated that district personnel eventually recommended letting the construction firm go due to a combination of circumstances resulting from Andersen’s work at Benson and the nearby Multiple Pathways to Graduation site.
In the memo, staff stated that Andersen had a history of failing to disclose cost overruns, which prevented the district from making well-informed judgments as work went on. According to the memo, Andersen, which remains on-site even though Benson opened in August, shocked PPS with an additional about $49 million in construction expenditures in one instance from only last month.
“It is reasonable to infer that Andersen inadequately managed construction changes with their subcontractors for such a large number of claims to have accumulated,” the letter says, even though some of those expenditures are probably justifiable increases in the construction costs. Andersen is investigating whether of those invoices should be sent to PPS for payment.
Knudsen told The Oregonian/OregonLive, “We are collaborating with PPS to find a fair solution to any unresolved issues.”
Additionally, the document characterized Andersen’s ability to adhere to the building timeline as inadequate.
According to the memo, actual site progress was frequently not reflected in the monthly updates to the building timetable. Instead of reflecting work that was actually finished, they reflected work that SHOULD have been done.
Knudsen stated, “The school opened on time,” but he would not comment on that assertion.
The PPS memo also reminded board members of theJune 2024 death of an ironworker, who was crushed when a forklift rolled onto the 33-year-old at the Benson construction site, prompting her estate to file a wrongful death lawsuit against Andersen.
Subcontractor Samantha Sam Deschenesin’s estate originally requested $25 million, but has now increased that amount to $31 million. The Multnomah County Circuit Court lawsuit is still continuing. “Our focus continues to be on the health and well-being of our team members, providing support to Samantha’s family, and working with safety and health officials as part of the accident review,” a representative for Andersen stated when The Oregonian/OregonLive reported on the initial lawsuit last year.
The memo said the death was a tragedy and noted that PPS is not a party to the ongoing litigation, while listing it as an example of job safety under a broader heading of Andersen performance concerns.
The recommendation to terminate the Andersen contract is another fork in the road for the district s two-decade-long quest to rebuild all of nine of its comprehensive high schools.
Six of those projects are complete. Three remain: Jefferson, Cleveland and Wells high schools, though work on the latter two is contingent upon voters agreeing to pass a $1.8 billion general obligation bond this May, of which up to $1.15 billion could be spent on the three schools.
But alarmed by that price tag, school board members pumped the brakes on all three of its high school projects this fall, requestingan audit of construction costs. The goal: To pare back costs in order to free up more bond funds for badly-needed maintenance at middle and elementary schools.
The audit showed that Andersen s total project management costs came in at $89 million, well above the $65 million set for Wells and Cleveland.
Pinpointing exactly what will be excised to save money Project management costs? Mass timber construction materials? Teen parenting centers? Square footage, including a reduction in the number of classrooms, which could mean teachers have to share space? is still a work-in-progress. But in the meantime, work on high schools has ceased, prompting uncertainty for the associated contractors, architects and engineers.
Terminating the Andersen contract could sour Portland s relationship within the building industry, district staff acknowledged in their memo. Severing a deal with Andersen, which the Portland Business Journal most recently ranked asthe fourth-largest civil or commercial general contractorin the Portland metro area, will doubtless send ripples through a community of architects, engineers and construction workers who are chatty even as they compete for work.
While public projects are among the more lucrative contracts local construction firms can win, the memo notes that clients who cancel contracts, as PPS proposes to do, may gain a reputation for unpredictability that repels future potential bidders.
PPS has revisited many decisions and restarted design on the Jefferson project in the past, district staff wrote in the memo, so another significant shift in the delivery of the project will almost certainly signal that the Jefferson project, and perhaps PPS projects more broadly, are risky for contractors.
Another unknown: how many other construction firms in the region have the bandwidth to take on the Portland Public Schools project. Two of the region s other large construction firms, Hoffman Construction and Skanska, are already contracted to work on Wells and Cleveland, respectively. (Skanska was also the contractor for the Franklin High rebuild and Hoffman built Lincoln High. Lease Crutcher Lewis rebuilt Roosevelt High, while Fortis Construction built McDaniel High.)
But district staff also suggested that as a complete teardown and rebuild, the Jefferson project now demands less finesse and complexity than the original concept to renovate the interior while restoring the historic exterior would have brought to bear, meaning that a wider pool of contractors may feel able to put in a bid.
Julia Silverman writes for The Oregonian/OregonLive about K–12 education. You can contact her at [email protected].
Jonathan Bach covers housing and real estate. Reach him by email [email protected] by phone at 503-221-4303.
