In 2002, local voters gave the Napa Valley Unified School District $95 million to modernize its buildings.

Four years later, the district has a gleaming, restored District Auditorium and administrative offices, and improvements have been made to campuses from Capell Valley to American Canyon.

Members of the Measure M Oversight Committee, a group of citizens who monitor the district’s spending, say the district is has done a solid job of administering Measure M funds.

The district’s spending is coming under scrutiny as it prepares to seek another bond in the November election, this one to build a high school in American Canyon and address other needs, perhaps include seismic work at Memorial Stadium and an expansion of the growing New Technology High School.

However, oversight committee members say increasing construction costs — some spurred by the demands Hurricane Katrina put on construction materials and the construction industry — are taking a bite out of the bond money.

“There is a rapid escalation in construction costs that no one could expect,” said Don Evans, NVUSD’s administrator of general services and facilities.

According to Ed Barwick, chairman of the Measure M Oversight Committee, the district will be as much as $5 million short of the cost to complete all the projects.

“The cost of steel, lumber and wallboard have just gone so far out of sight,” Barwick said.

Skip Keyser, a property manager in Napa who sits on the board, said Measure M bond funds have been spent “efficiently and economically.” Emphasizing that he was speaking for himself only and not for the oversight committee, he noted that the district has had to grapple not only with rising construction costs, but also with shifting priorities related to school demographics and complexities of renovating and modernizing older facilities.

Big ticket items

The costliest item on the Measure M to-do list was an earthquake retrofit and required fire, life and safety upgrades to the district office. The total cost for that was $10 million.

Other sites that received expensive projects are Vintage and Napa high schools. At Vintage, a new swimming pool, athletic field house and new gym lockers, are just some of the items planned. Napa High is looking to get a new machine shop building, athletic field house and a practice gym, among other projects.

Other funds from Measure M are being spent on updating classrooms and restrooms, expanding libraries, buying new lunch tables and building a number of multi-use rooms at different elementary schools.

At the middle school level, some of the projects are new gym lockers, modernized science classrooms and a new paint job.

So far, the locations with the most completed projects are the district office, Napa Valley Language Academy, Yountville Elementary, Shearer and American Canyon Middle School.

These sites were selected to receive their projects first because they did not receive any upgrades from Measure Y, a previous school bond.

The rest of the 198 projects are scheduled to be completed between now and the 2007-08 school year.

All in all, the district has completed roughly 20 percent of the projects, with many more from one-third to two-thirds complete, according to Measure M Oversight Committee statistics.

Due to the rising cost of some projects, NVUSD’s Evans said he will present a list of projects he believes need to be cut at the next oversight committee meeting in August. Evans would not identify particular projects, stating he needs to inform the committee first.