By JOSEPH B. NADEAU

WOONSOCKET — Members of the City Council and School Committee learned Thursday night the effort to construct two new middle schools for city children is becoming an escalator ride of higher than expected costs.

 And that is happening even before a shovel has gone into the ground for the voter-approved $74 million project.
 The problem is whether the city should continue to focus on building the two schools on one campus off Hamlet Avenue and Florence Drive as originally proposed, and pay nearly double the expected clean-up  costs for the site — or activate one of the plan's alternative locations at Barry Field or Aylsworth Avenue.
 The building committee for the school project has spent long hours trying to find an answer to that question, Joel D. Mathews told the panels during a joint meeting in Harris Hall, and is recommending the 21-acre parcel at Hamlet Avenue and Florence Drive be retained as the location of the schools.
The recommendation came after a detailed presentation by Mathews and the city's contractors on the project as to what costs can be expected at each site.
"The question of the day has become if you want to do option one (two 880-student schools at Hamlet), where does the additional money come from?" Mathews said during the presentation.
The budget approved via referendum in August set aside $4 million for clean-up at the Hamlet site—  but recently concluded negotiations with the state Department of Environmental Management established a current cost of $7.7 million for that work, Mathews told the panels.
The city will also be required to conduct some additional testing of land abutting the site along the Blackstone River to determine the extent of the site's contamination impact on the river, he noted.
Then, factor in construction delays related to testing that have already added roughly $2 million to the original price tag.
The bottom line: In order to continue using Hamlet Avenue as the school site, Mathews said the project is already $6 million more costly than the $74 million package approved by voters.
The next option would be to build a 1,000-student school at Barry Field and a 770-student school on Aylsworth Avenue; option three call for two schools,, one at the least contaminated portion of the Hamlet Avenue site, the other at Barry Field.
  Option two would require $2.8 million in additional funding, but would also generate undetermined site clean-up costs from the Woonsocket Sponging mill property on Aylsworth Avenue. It would also cost more to bus students to Barry Field, and eliminate the operational savings the city had expected by having two buildings at the Hamlet site.
Option three, entailing two 880-student schools at Barry Field and Hamlet, would have lower clean-up costs. But the city would again lose the efficiency of two buildings at one location, Mathews said.
The building committee also considered a fourth option that would construct one 880-student school at Barry Field and a smaller 730-student building at Hamlet, but that plan would not meet the future growth needs of the district and was not recommended for consideration, he said.
Council President Leo T. Fontaine asked whether the added cost would make demolition of the existing middle school viable as a new site option, but Mathews said such a plan would still have a higher cost than new construction and is not included as an alternative in the state the Department of Education construction plan. That plan will give the city approximately 81 percent state reimbursement if kept in force, he said. 
The continued use of Hamlet Avenue as the sole location could be funded by an assortment of grants and project contributions as well as a federal Section 108 Housing and Urban Development loan, Mathews said.
 The grants could include $600,000 in funding that would be sought from the federal
Environmental Protection Agency for hazardous materials clean up and another $175,000 from a program that funds Petroleum product cleanups, according to Mathews.
 The city could also win another $1.1 million in grant funding for computer technology infrastructure in the schools that was not initially expected.
  The city could also apply a projected $500,000 to the added cost from the sale of the old middle school at Park Place to a developer and apply about $1 million in this year's and next year's city Community Development Block Grants to the clean up, he said.
  The city was also able to work a $2 million contribution from ACS Industries, the owner of about 60 percent of the site, to the cost of the clean up at Hamlet Avenue, he said.
 The city had initially planned to purchase the site from ACS for $1 and add its property to land the city  already owns at the location.
 The city was to cover the cost of the clean up that resulted, both the demolition of the remaining ACS buildings and the hazardous materials removal, as part of that acquisition.
In light of the new clean up costs surfacing from the DEM's remediation requirements, ACS offered on Thursday to contribute the $2 million as payment on the clean-up, Mathews said.
 That contribution would be available only if the city used the contaminated land at the site, a plan that is a goal for the city in redeveloping the former industrial lands to new use.
  While the costs of the clean up have gone up, Mathews said the final studies did not identify any new materials requiring remediation.
 Instead, the further studies show only a greater extent of the contaminates already identified, a heavy grade heat oil and an industrial cleaning solvent.
 The DEM's plan for clean up of the site to school use and residential standards will require all of the hazardous materials to be removed and the areas affected to be properly capped, he said. The plans being drawn up by Ai3 Architects of Providence and the Gilbane Building Company of Providence would also feature extensive use of vapor barriers and other preventative measures to eliminate any potential impact from those areas in the future, according to Mathews.
 While hearing details of the options Thursday, members of the Council and School Committee are not expected to vote on the site issues until next week or possibly later.
 Councilwoman Suzanne J. Vadenais said she has been attending meetings of the building committee and sees the problem of selecting a site as far from resolved.
 "It was a rock in the road that has turned into a mountain," Vadenais said of the work she sees ahead of the city. "I have never seen a project like this where it is one disaster after another," she said.