Last November, Scott Besler, who was the construction supervisor of a major remodeling project at New York Elementary School, was watching when four heavy gates weighing 350 pounds each were delivered.

Besler said the gates were supposed to be installed no later than January, the month he quit his job in part because of his concerns over safety violations.

But the gates weren’t installed, and in August one of the gates, which were leaning unsecured against a brick structure, fell on an 8-year-old boy who had wandered into the construction site, breaking bones and collapsing the top part of his lungs.

“We were behind the eight-ball from day one on New York,” Besler, 52, told the Journal-World in an exclusive interview. “There is a lot of stuff that didn’t get done in a timely manner. There were safety violations. I would go home and be stressed out as if I physically pounded a nail all day.”

Bryant D. Combes, owner of Combes Construction, a Bucyrus company that is the contractor for the New York school site, did not return requests for an interview over several weeks.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, after learning about the problems at the site last week, was planning to send an inspector to the school to conduct its own review of worker safety issues, Tam Le, an OSHA safety engineer, told the Journal-World recently. The results of that visit have not yet been released.

In an odd turn last year, the city gave the school district an exemption from city inspections and permitted the district to hire a third-part reviewer to do the building inspections for the district’s $92 million bond project, which was approved in 2013. The district had asked the city to do the inspections for free, but the city, which had estimated the cost for permits and inspections at $280,000, said there was no way for it to recoup its costs.

The district then contracted with Douglas County, which offered its services for free, to have the county’s chief building officer, Jim Sherman, handle plumbing, electrical and mechanical inspections. The district also contracted with a Kansas City company to conduct structural inspections for a fee.

The district did not require any inspections for construction site safety that would have ensured proper fencing, for example. Instead, the district’s contracts with its construction companies required the companies to police themselves.

School district officials have not yet explained why they structured the contract in a way that didn’t require inspections related to construction site safety.

But Julie Boyle, district spokeswoman, said the district’s goal continues to be student safety.

“There is nothing more important to us than the safety of students and staff,” Boyle said. “The processes we have in place are in keeping with that priority.”

The accident

The school district is nearing the end of a major construction project on 20 schools, as well as the construction of the new College and Career Center.

On Aug. 13, Max McGill had wandered into the construction site at New York school while he was being supervised by a babysitter.

Because the school at 936 New York St. is in the middle of a residential neighborhood, it wasn’t unusual for children and adults to wander around the construction site in the spring and summer evenings and on weekends, several neighbors, including David Herrod, who lives across the street from the school, said. At the time of the accident, there was no fencing to keep anyone out. Combes ended its contract with Kansas Fencing at the end of June, and the fencing was taken down, the fencing company told the Journal-World Thursday.

Boyle, while maintaining that site safety is the responsibility of only Combes Construction, said that during the school year, parents and children were educated about the dangers of walking into construction sites and warned to stay out.

In June 2014, Besler said he got a call from Combes Construction to come work at New York Elementary as the construction supervisor. As a superintendent, Besler was in charge of the field work and the workers.

Besler said he was an experienced construction manager who had worked for Ferrell Construction, a well-respected Topeka company, until the owner retired recently.

One of the first things he noticed was that the site plan required fencing around the perimeter of the construction site. City and county code require that the fencing be 8 feet tall in order to keep people out. The fencing was supposed to surround the perimeter of the block from Ninth and 10th streets and New York and New Jersey streets.

But the contractor wanted to save money, Besler said, and ordered that no metal fencing be used along New Jersey Street, which borders the back of the school. Instead Besler was told to use the orange “snow-drift” plastic fencing that is only about 4 feet high.

At Home Depot, the cost of the orange fencing is about $23 for 50 feet. Metal fencing, by contrast, will cost several thousand dollars to rent — about $25 for 12 feet the first month and about half after that, according to one website — during the project, which was expected to be completed in August this year.

“The problem with the orange fence is it is hard to maintain,” Besler said. “It gets knocked down. Every night you are looking at tying it back up.”

It also doesn’t really keep anyone out, Besler said.

The site plan also requested that erosion controls be set up, but Besler said there was little erosion control.

Money vs. safety

Besler said the project manager with Combes said several times that the budget was tight for certain expenditures.

In November, Besler said the big gates that would be used to enclose the dumpster pads arrived.

The plan called for the dumpster pads to be enclosed with brick and the gates.

Workers leaned the gates up against a wall in the dumpster area.

“I said, ‘Hey, lay them down flat. Don’t lean them over against that dumpster thing,'” Besler said. “I had to get a forklift to set them on the ground.”

Workers were belligerent and wouldn’t follow orders, he said.

He said he would ask workers at the end of the day to check the fences and to put safety caps on the top of the metal rebar, which held up the orange fence and also was used to stabilize newly poured concrete, but they often ignored him.

“They literally said, ‘(Expletive) off, we are done for the day,'” Besler said. “It’s like brushing your teeth. You pour concrete and you have rebar sticking up. One of the workers grabs the (rebar caps) and starts capping it. It takes 15 minutes.”

But if you don’t, Besler said, “That rebar will cut you faster than anything. These guys just don’t get it.”

He also said workers refused to wear safety equipment.

“I would tell them to wear hard hats,” he said. “‘No, we ain’t wearin’ hardhats. You wear them.'”

He said he talked to Bryant Combes, the owner, and the project manager, about their attitudes.

“I said these guys have the worst attitudes in the world; I don’t want them on my job,” Besler said. But he said the men, who mainly were from the Bucyrus area, had worked for the company for many years and Combes said he needed them.

Besler said he also talked to school officials, including the principal and the superintendent, and all were aware of his concerns.

Boyle with the district, however, said that “no safety concerns were reported to district administration.”

Because of organization problems and delays in receiving materials and equipment, work backed up.

When cold set in, Besler said he told the project manager they needed to buy heaters, propane and tarps to help speed up drying of paint and sheetrock mud.

The project manager told him there was no money in the budget for that, Besler said.

“I said, ‘What do you mean?'” Besler said. “‘You knew we were going to be working on this in winter.'”

Because work was behind schedule, during the Christmas holidays, Besler had to work long hours every day, including Christmas and New Year’s Day, to try to meet deadlines.

In January, he quit.

“I told them I just can’t do this,” Besler said. “Your lack of planning in the office comes down to the work in the field. They said, ‘This is the way it is.’ It was such a cluster, it just wasn’t worth it.”

In late June, the fencing came down.

After the accident on Aug. 13, Combes put metal fencing back up, but on New Jersey, it only put up the plastic orange fencing, even though a city codes official — Scott McCullough, director of the city’s Planning and Development Department — has said the entire construction area should have been fenced.

The company also appears to still be slipping past the code. A reporter documented several pieces of rebar without caps last week.

On Friday, Gregory Herrod, who lives across the street from the project, sent photos to the Lawrence City Commission and staff and the Journal-World purporting to show a violation involving concrete pouring. He wondered who was enforcing code now.

“Is the city going to be responsible for maintaining this work?” asked Herrod, who has a degree in architecture and works on construction projects around the country.