District accuses engineer of 'malpractice'
The Garrison school district has sued the firm it hired to design a nearly $3 million heating system that officials describe as so underperforming that children sometimes wear their coats in classrooms.
In 2020, Garrison contracted with Tetra Tech Architects & Engineers to provide design services for $10 million in voter-approved upgrades, the most expensive of which was a $2.7 million heat-pump system to warm and cool the whole building. That system, according to a lawsuit filed March 25 in state court, fails to meet state standards requiring a minimum indoor temperature of 65 degrees from Sept. 15 to May 31 and the provision of outdoor air at all times.
Tetra Tech has not yet responded to the lawsuit in court. The firm did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
The Garrison district said staff have had to "dedicate substantial administrative time" to monitoring and manually adjusting settings since the system became operational. On cold days, they have "to choose between maintaining adequate heat for students and staff or introducing the outdoor air necessary to satisfy ventilation requirements," according to the legal filing.
Garrison officials said the pumps also blow cold air during the system's defrost cycle, when heat is temporarily redirected to melt frost from the coils of the outdoor units.
They accuse Tetra Tech, whose long list of school-district clients includes Beacon, of architectural malpractice and professional negligence, negligent misrepresentation and breach of contract. Their lawsuit is seeking unspecified damages, "including costs to investigate, monitor, redesign, repair, replace, remediate and correct" the system.
Tetra Tech's "defective HVAC design did not merely create a technical problem," according to Garrison officials. "It left children wearing coats in class and forced the district to divert administrative time and public resources to constant troubleshooting of a system that should have worked properly in the first place."
Garrison officials chose the heat pumps over an alternative: a system in which water heated by the building's boilers would be distributed to the elementary and middle-school classrooms, while the remainder of the middle school, such as the gym and bathrooms, would continue to be heated using oil.
When the board voted on July 1, 2019, for the heat pumps, then-President James Hoch said they offered a "unified" system. Before the vote, Garrett Hamlin, a Tetra Tech vice president, told the board that "we've had a lot of conversations about heating systems, but there are other areas of this project that are really critical," such as bathrooms, the phone system and security upgrades.
"All of those things are really important parts of this project, and I don't want us to lose sight of that," said Hamlin.
Seven years later, the focus is on the heating system. Garrison's lawsuit alleges several problems with its design and installation, beginning with the weather data used in Tetra Tech's calculations. The district says the company relied on reports from LaGuardia Airport "rather than more representative local data," according to court documents.
Tetra Tech is also accused of failing to adequately consider how heat would transfer through the outer shell of its building, which is more than 100 years old, and "eliminated or omitted" Dedicated Outdoor Air System units, which condition outdoor air for indoor ventilation. It also designed a system that is not "adequately sized to temper required volumes of cold outdoor air while maintaining required indoor temperatures," according to the district.
Notified of the problems, Tetra Tech "failed to provide an adequate cure that restored reliable, code-compliant heating and ventilation," according to court documents.
The system is part of a menu of upgrades approved by district voters in September 2019 that included refurbished ceilings, floors, doors and cabinets, bathroom renov...

Garrison School Sues Over Heating System