The New York City School Construction Authority's $89.4 million site preparation contract for its new St. John Villa campus in Arrochar, Staten Island, included 255 geothermal boreholes drilled 600 feet deep, according to the agency's bid drawings.
Navillus Tile Inc., which does business as Navillus Contracting, was low at $89,433,000 when four firms bid the early work and site preparation contract in June 2025.
“The label said site preparation. The drawings said twenty-nine miles.”
Sheet GEO100, the overall geothermal site plan issued for bid March 6, 2025, shows six-inch bores on a 20-foot grid. Each carries 1.5-inch DR-11 polyethylene pipe. Twenty-seven circuits run back to a manifold room built under the bleachers of the new athletic field.
Run the math and it's 153,000 feet of hole. That's about 29 miles of drilling, more than twice the length of Manhattan, pointed straight down under a ballfield.
The two schools on the campus won't have boilers. A bidder on the later buildings contract asked about blank boiler lines in the HVAC breakdown, and the SCA answered in writing that boilers are not in the scope of work. An earlier addendum said the project has no boiler or hot-water flues.
That's city policy showing up on a jobsite. Under Leading the Charge, the city's $4 billion program announced in 2022, new SCA schools are all-electric and 100 existing schools are to be converted by 2030. The city has called it its largest single step toward the 50% cut in government emissions that Local Law 97 requires.
The campus is also designed to Local Law 51 of 2023, the city's green building standard. Plans include rooftop solar on the IS/HS, the PS/IS and the maintenance building, solar canopies over the parking, and electric vehicle charging, according to the solicitation.
The well field was bid inside a site preparation package under a general contractor. The contract's title didn't mention geothermal work.
Specification Section 15711 sets the terms. It requires a minimum 50-year manufacturer's warranty on the loop pipe and U-bends, and a hydrostatic test of the assembled field at 150% of design pressure. It bans ethylene glycol and potassium acetate as heat-transfer fluid. And it has the contractor carry a contingency for flowing artesian wells.
The campus isn't fully free of fossil fuel. The drawings include an emergency generator that runs on fuel oil, with tanks and flues.
The RFI Wire's look at the SCA boiler market last month searched more than 4,200 solicitation titles for the terms heat pump and electrification. It missed this contract, because the title called the work site preparation.
The SCA manages more than 1,400 school buildings. The 2030 conversion target covers 100 of them.
What to do next
If you drill, fuse HDPE or do deep grouting, don't pass on a bid because the title says early work or site prep. On a new school, pull the drawings and look for a sheet number that starts with GEO.
And price the spec, not just the hole. A 50-year pipe warranty, a 150% pressure test, banned fluids and an artesian-well contingency all come with this kind of work.
Anjali Mehta is an RFI Wire TV presenter. This story was reported and edited by The RFI Wire news desk. Updated October 17 to add Navillus's legal name.