With 40 years of experience, The Lawson Group has serviced many schools and municipal buildings, predominantly addressing issues with asbestos and Indoor Air Quality. Planning is always the best tool in this to know what you’ve got for issues and problems. And the more we can get the cities and towns to talk to their own districts in terms of budgeting, the better off they can be.
Transcription:
We do a significant amount of work for cities and towns and for schools, in particular, relative to indoor air quality and asbestos.
I would say the biggest challenge in working with those groups is because they are public entities they are always restricted by budgets and in a lot of cases, it’s hard for them to allocate the resources to do a lot of this work ahead of time.
A lot of it’s reactionary in nature. And any time we end up doing this type of work in a reactionary fashion it’s much more time-consuming. It’s much more expensive. And in a lot of cases, it gets in the way of the work that they’re trying to do.
Again, they didn’t anticipate that they were going to have to deal with asbestos or lead or mold when they get into a building.
Our favorite story is we had a facilities manager for a school district several years ago, and we were talking to him in March or April and kind of casually said, “So do you have anything coming up this year?”
He looked at us and he said, “Well, nothing more than a $20 million major renovation of the high school.”
And we looked at him and said, “You have considered asbestos in this right?”
He said, “Oh, I think the GC has taken care of that.”
Well, a quick phone call to the GC said, “What asbestos?”
We had all we could do to manage what they had to do to deal with and abate the asbestos before they started with this $20 million expansion plan for the high school about four months later.
Planning is always the best tool in this to know what you’ve got for issues and problems. And the more we can get the cities and towns to talk to their own districts in terms of budgeting, the better off they can be.
And we’re happy to help out with that whole process because we’ve been through it a thousand times and we know exactly how it works.
