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With schools, this guy can s-t-r-e-t-c-h a buck
By KENT FISCHER © St. Petersburg Times, published October 8, 2000 When it came time for Ken Trufant to trade in his truck two years ago, he researched the new minivan he wanted to buy. He studied the options packages, found out their wholesale costs, and calculated what he thought to be a fair price.
When he and his wife, Alta, built their gulf-front home in Aripeka, Trufant saved thousands of dollars by designing the house himself and by hiring the subcontractors, even though he didn't have a background in architecture or construction. "I'm not afraid of get into something that I know nothing about if I think there's a better way of doing business," said Trufant, 64. It's that combination of moxie and bargain hunting that convinced Pasco County school administrators three years ago to put Trufant in charge of the biggest construction spree in the history of the district. "I see letters come across my desk to architects and contractors from Ken that make my hair curl," said Superintendent John Long. "Ken Trufant is a hard-ass, and I mean that as a compliment." As the district's $100-million, 10-school construction spree begins to wind down, Trufant looks more and more like he was the right man for the job of director of new construction for the school district: The district built Wesley Chapel and Mitchell high schools for a combined $21-million less than comparable facilities around Florida. Trufant and his associates came up with a plan to build middle schools using a revised elementary school design, saving the district hundreds of thousands of dollars. Prior to the idea, the district said it couldn't afford to build middle schools. Now, two new ones will open next fall. Elementary schools are being built in 10 months, a heretofore unthinkably fast construction schedule. The district has claimed nearly $12-million in state rebates for building its schools below state-average costs. More rebates are coming. Trufant has saved the school system more than $1-million by requiring contractors to purchase their building materials through the district, which doesn't have to pay sales tax. And those are just the big accomplishments. Trufant also has convinced the company building three new schools to forego some of its payments if the district doesn't like the quality of the work being done. He's played hardball with architects and engineers, whittling down their fees from $400,000 a new school to about $260,000. "I really enjoy negotiating," Trufant said. "We've saved big tax dollars, and I believe the school district is getting an excellent value for its money." Trufant quickly adds that he alone is not responsible for the success of the district's construction projects. It's been a team effort all the way, he said, from the bookkeepers who track the payment requests to the building code inspectors riding herd over the contractors. "We are lean and mean," Trufant says of the 11 people in the construction department. Anyone who is surprised at the way the construction department has stretched the district's construction budget doesn't know Trufant very well. The man stretches dollars like they were taffy, his colleagues say. It was Trufant, after all, who convinced then-Superintendent Tom Weightman in the late 1970s to invest in a new, cross-county microwave telephone system that's still in use today. Before the system was built, the district was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in toll charges because it was a long-distance call from one side of the district to the other. The new phone system cost $150,000 to build and install, but it saved so much money that it paid for itself in three years. "I knew nothing about telecommunications, but I knew damn well there had to be a better way," he said. And it was Trufant who walked into Weightman's office in the early 1980s and told him he could trim $1-million out of the district's energy budget. Weightman laughed, and told him to go for it. Trufant organized an energy committee which, through retrofitting and conservation efforts, has cut the district's energy costs by a third over the past 10 years, even though the amount of air-conditioned floor space in the district has grown about 35 percent during the same time. "If you look at a lot of the really good business decisions this district has made, a lot of the times Ken Trufant is the man who made them work," Long said. "He's just as good with the school system's money as he is with his own." Trufant's work in the district's construction and purchasing departments has won him national recognition among his peers. Trufant recently won the highest award given by the National Institute of Governmental Purchasing Inc., a professional organization of purchasing agents. Although he was born in New York City, Trufant considers himself a Pasco native. He lettered in football and baseball at Gulf High, graduating 1953. At the time, his graduating class of 33 students was the largest in the school's history. Soon after graduation, he married Alta, his high school sweetheart. He graduated from the University of South Florida and got a job as a foreman in a small Pasco print shop. A few years later he bought the shop and grew it into the county's biggest printing operation. Trufant sold the business in the early 1970s when, he said, competition from smaller shops made it increasingly harder to do quality work and still make money. "People would come in and say, "I don't care how it looks, just print it,' " Trufant said. "I just couldn't do that. If it said "Trufant Printing' at the bottom, you bet your sweet bippy that it was the best job we could do." He dabbled in real estate for a few years, but when the recession hit in the mid-70s, Trufant went to work for the school district. He ran the purchasing department for years, and also oversaw the warehouse operations. Trufant didn't wait long to make his mark on school construction, which he took over in early 1998. The district's two new high schools, Wesley Chapel and Mitchell, were in the works. The Mitchell project, though, was mired in problems. The architect kept saying he couldn't design a high school for only $20-million, and the educators didn't like the design the architect put forward. Trufant thought it made no sense to include athletic facilities in the school construction when the building itself was "bare bones." And the district's building inspectors found what they thought were structural flaws with the designs. Enrollments at Pasco's four west-side high schools were ballooning, and Superintendent Long had been all over the county telling community groups that two new high schools were going to open in the fall of 1999. It was Trufant who advocated delaying the project one year until the problems could be worked out. "My stomach was flip-flopping," Trufant said, "but we were building a $20-million facility that nobody liked." Trufant and his associates in the construction department retooled the project. Athletic facilities were cut from the initial phases of construction, a move that allowed more money to be spent on the school and classroom amenities. The move also allowed the district to build the school bigger, which qualified the project for a hefty rebate from the state, which rewards districts for building inexpensive schools. Mitchell opened this past August and cost $12,394 per student, $6,000 per student less than the average Florida high school. The low cost means a $6.5-million rebate from the state, which the district will use to build the athletic facilities cut from the original plan. Much of that money also will go toward building a new elementary school. Trufant says Mitchell is his department's top accomplishment. "I defy anyone to show me a nicer school for the money," he said.
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