The revelation this past week that Johnson Controls Inc. had blown through the St. Louis County School District’s entire contingency fund on its $78.8 million facilities project was alarming, but hardly surprising.

The company ran into similar issues in Duluth, where cost overruns pushed the Duluth School District’s own facilities project more than $15 million over budget.

At this point, the overruns for the St. Louis County Schools are more modest, but with work ongoing in every single school, we probably haven’t seen the end of the red ink yet. And school board members are justifiably anxious to know whether the district will have enough money available to complete all the work.

Already, the school district has turned to the Minnesota Department of Education to seek permission to levy additional tax dollars without a public vote, by claiming some of the additional expense was related to health and safety issues, which can be levied by school districts without a referendum.

This is a troubling situation made necessary by a laundry list of questionable decisions and poor oversight by Johnson Controls, which is supposed to be managing the facilities project for the school district.

A typical example is the mess made by one of JCI’s sub-contractors, which ripped up playground equipment from Orr and shipped it to Tower. School board members were surprised to hear the objections from Orr residents, since they were unaware that the playground equipment (which had been paid for and built entirely by local donations and volunteers) was even being moved. No one from JCI or the district office would take responsibility for the decision and school board members ordered that the equipment be returned to Orr. At the time, JCI officials promised the equipment would be brought back to Orr at no charge, but the school board has since learned that the whole playground fiasco was billed to the district, to the tune of $31,000.

Of course, that’s peanuts compared to some of the big ticket disasters. School board members are now wondering why the taxpayers are footing the bill for potentially millions of dollars in additional expenses related to a long list of errors, mostly code violations, in the original architectural drawings produced by Architectural Resources, Inc., the architectural firm hired by JCI for the project.

Normally, when a professional firm makes such errors, the firm pays the cost of correcting them, not the client. But that’s not how it’s working with this project. JCI’s representative Randy Anderson told the school board this past week that the contract JCI signed with Architectural Resources included provisions that make it difficult to recover losses due to the company’s own errors.

The school board shouldn’t take Anderson’s word for it. They should demand a copy of the contract for their attorney to review, so the district can decide for itself whether to seek recovery. And while they’re at it, they should make the architect’s contract public. The Timberjay has been fighting since last spring to get a copy of the contract from JCI, but JCI has spent tens of thousands of dollars to fight our request. Now we’re starting to understand why.

If it’s true that JCI signed a contract with the architect that didn’t serve the interests of the school district, perhaps it’s time the school board start asking why that is. And if the school district can’t recover from the architect, they should ask JCI to pay the cost.

The school board, so far, has been woefully late in any quest for accountability on this project. Still, better late than never.