BUFFALO TWP — The Freeport School Board Wednesday voted to award contracts totaling $3.57 million for its athletics complex project.

The board awarded the contract for the stadium construction to DiMarco Construction of Clariton, Allegheny County, for $2.1 million.

It also awarded separate contracts for plumbing, HVAC, electrical and synthetic turf construction, awarded to the lowest bidders, board President Dan Lucovich said.

Construction is expected to begin by Nov. 1 and will be completed next summer before fall sports begin.

The new stadium will be on the campus with the high school and middle school off Route 356.

This fall the Yellowjackets football team is playing its games for the final time on Swartz Field in Freeport, its home since the 1920s.

The board decided earlier in the year that it made more sense to build the new complex on its campus in the township rather than spending money to renovate Swartz Field, which it leases from the borough.

The complex will be home to football, girls lacrosse and girls and boys soccer games. The plans call for a seating capacity of 2,000 and a synthetic turf field.

It went with four alternate options in the bid that cut about $150,000 off the cost and made DiMarco the lowest bidder for the stadium construction.

The contract the board awarded will not include a ticket booth, it calls for an asphalt shingle roof as opposed to a metal roof, it calls for a split-face concrete exterior instead of a brick veneer and it calls for one grandstand as opposed to separate stands for the home crowd and the band.

Lucovich defended the choice of building one grandstand by reiterating that the marching band only performs for football games, and it is not a football-only stadium.

“It’s not simply a stadium for football, it’s an athletic complex that has to be supportive of all the sports that go in there,” he said.

The district’s planning work with its athletic facilities is not over yet.

The board also voted Wednesday to have VEBH Architects prepare conceptual design documents for new baseball and softball fields to be built adjacent to Freeport Middle School. It also voted to have Pennsylvania Soil and Rock do a topographic survey of the area.

The new athletic complex will be displacing the current softball diamond and the district will play its baseball games at Swartz Field this spring.

This means that the new diamonds would need to be completed in time for the spring 2017 season.

The cost for that project is unknown, although Lucovich noted that turf, as opposed to grass, would cost an additional $375,000.