The first round of bids for a new Shawano County Courthouse, 150-bed jail and jail auxiliary services resulted in a multimillion-dollar cost savings from what was budgeted.
Members of the public property committee approved and forwarded to the county board the bids recommended by Kurt Berner, of The Samuels Group.
“You had a great bid day,” he said. “You’re currently $6.5 million under the budget for bid pack 1.”
The bid deadline was pushed back a week at the request of several contractors, a decision Berner said helped get additional bidders for the project framework and long lead time items.
Base bids included work for the courthouse and jail auxiliary services. The alternate bids were for work on the 150-bed jail housing unit.
“Every one of these contractors we have worked with outside of Dairyland Grading, but we did do some reference checks on Dairyland Grading, and they all checked out,” Berner said.
Earlier this year, county supervisors agreed to a maximum of $88.5 million for the base work and $121 million if the jail housing pod was included.
Berner said once the full county board approves the recommended contractors, the numbers will be put into a guaranteed maximum price amendment in the contract between the county and The Samuels Group.
“What the amendment is going to do is have me put it in writing to say that if there is a penny spent over $121 million, it’s on us,” he said.
While line items may go up or down, the maximum will always be the maximum, he said. Also, the $121 million includes contingency funds, and any unused contingency funds at the end of the project revert back to the county. Berner said if the results of the second bid pack, which will be let in November and decided on in January, continue to be below budget, the county may not have to borrow as much as projected.
The county board is expected to vote on the recommended contractors Oct. 28.
Berner explained that contractors could bid one category or multiple categories.
Regarding the detention bid, he said the bid was only for frame and glass in the new jail.
“We do have a component of detention that will go out in bid pack 2, which is detention furniture,” he said. “There are components that are in the jail that have to be detention-grade furniture.”
The electrical category only included the generator, which has a long lead time.
There was no recommendation for the HVAC category. Berner said it was not communicated well to the contractors that the county wanted chillers and boilers in one package. Only J.F. Ahern Co. bid in that way.
“Their number is over budget,” Berner said. “In talking to the engineers, we’re going to recommend to push that back into bid pack 2.”
He also discussed the changes made from precast concrete to cast-in-place concrete and masonry. The result was a savings of nearly $5.75 million.
“When we started working with Venture, we did an evaluation of how much of that structure is done with CMU (concrete masonry unit) and masonry, which would be block and brick, or precast components,” Berner said. “That’s a market we have been tracking, because sometimes the precast market is high, sometimes it’s very competitive.
“And while we were looking at this, the precast market, even though they had a long lead time, we saw that, that precast component we thought would be more cost-effective, so we increased some of the precast from what we had as our original budget … and we reduced the masonry number. That decision played out well. We were a little bit over on our precast, but we’re significantly under on our CMU.”
The budget for the base and alternate work to be performed under bid pack 1 was $34.27 million. Recommended bids totaled $27.7 million. Savings on the base project totaled $4.3 million, while savings on the alternate work was $2.2 million for a total of $6.5 million.
kpasson@newmedia-wi.com
