For about three hours tonight, members of the Portsmouth School Committee and Gym construction committee performed a hands-on walkthrough of the new gym to review the punchlist before tomorrow's meeting with the architect and contractors. It was technically a School Committee meeting, but no media bothered to show up, no PCC members, not even Larry "I have considerable experience in high technology integration systems" Fitzmorris.

Let me tell you why: Fitzmorris's grandstanding to the contrary, there's nothing there "the school committee needs to answer for." I walked through that building, poked at things with my own two hands, talked with both Jack Callahan and outgoing maintenance director Rick Elmasian, and looked at every punchlist item. Are there things wrong? Yes, clearly.

There are a handful of major issues like fine-tuning the heating system, routing the septic line, frost-heave problems on a couple of the North doors, loading dock insulation, and some safety issues with the bleachers. The rest of the 7-page punchlist is, not to minimize it, mostly cosmetic items, which as Terry Cortvriend asserted, "We paid for it, and we want it fixed."

My experience in project management is purely on the software side, but what I saw tonight looked fairly typical for the state of affairs at a handover to a client. The big issues are things that need to be addressed by the architect or contractors, and that looks like the agenda for the meeting tomorrow. The small things, well, some of them you get, some of them you eat, and some of them you live with. Nothing is ever delivered perfect. In the software world where I work, almost half the projects never even make it out the porthole before the ship goes down, so I am completely in awe of the really beautiful gym we now have in Portsmouth.

The stuff that needs to get fixed, will. If it doesn't, Larry, well, then you can get up on your soapbox.