Facing a July 4 deadline, the Bremer County Board of Supervisors decided on Tuesday, June 24, to wait one more week on potential reductions on phase two of the courthouse renovation project.
Officials from the general contractor, Miron Construction, have said they want to know how to proceed by the July Fourth holiday.
Miron Construction Senior Vice President of Iowa Operations Jonathan Daniels walked through potential drawing changes and potential savings to phase two that would bring the overall cost within $9.8 million. The overall budget in the phase two bid documents in early June was $9.38 million. Phase two bids initially came in $788,852 (8.4%) over this budget at that time and has been reduced in scope details after the general contractors visited with bidders about ways to save.
The board decided for Daniels to ask the architectural firm, ISG, for a bid to redesign phase two. Courthouse project liaison Scott LaRue expressed concern that some original goals of renovation have been lost in proposed cost-cutting measures.
The redesign conversation is expected to continue at the July 1 meeting along with, hopefully, a decision.
Daniels said reimagining the project without the garage would lead to a redesign to try to capture the efficiencies of removing the garage.
Backfilling the garage with soil would result in less savings than would reorganizing the space, Daniels said.
“So we would reject all bids, we would go back to a redesign process and start a new schedule from there,” Daniels said.
Or they could leave the third floor as a shell space, not finishing the interior until later, saving about $25,000, Daniels said.
Supervisor Dewey Hildebrandt said one of the reasons for building onto the courthouse was to bring staff from auxiliary buildings like the older annex, where county human resources staff is now located, onsite.
“I think the savings we’re going to realize for the taxpayers comes from shuttering and selling the annex and bringing in more of those office spaces,” Hildebrandt said. “That was a discussion from the concept that we had about one of the reasons for building onto the courthouse, was to bring those back onsite. To not accomplish that is I think foolish.”
Daniels left it to the architectural firm to them to give a cost estimate to convert the basement to office space.
Courthouse project liaison Scott LaRue advised the board to reduce the scope of the project.
“In your guys’ position, we started out with our list of wants and needs … we’ve stripped all the finishes out, we’ve stripped it down as far as possible, I think I would redesign and come back.”
LaRue said priorities when the project first started were a meeting room, air handlers, a generator and a bigger election space.
“Come back with just those,” he said.
LaRue suggested leaving the elevator where it was, rather than moving it, if possible. He pointed out work that has been removed includes tuck pointing “which we’ve been putting off four to five years” and updating any of the boilers.
Supervisor Bob Brunkhorst summarized, “So really taking a step back, let’s focus on our priorities, and redesign, really start from scratch for phase two?”
“Kind of. It’s been scaled down to pretty much building space,” LaRue said.
Supervisor Corey Cerwinske said, “From my perspective, we’re still just north of $500,000 above our highest workable number that we had discussed, so I think we’re forced into a redesign, is my perspective. To Scott’s point, determining the scope, to get back to those numbers, I think we’re going to have to narrow that scope as far as what features the new building area has. (…) Potential realignment has merit.”
Hildebrandt expressed fears that with a complete redesign, the board may not see the anticipated dollar savings.
“At some point we’ve got to ask ourselves if we’re wasting money if you redesign and ISG comes back with a significant cost added to redesign. Have we really accomplished our end goal, or do we end up with less space. (I’m) thinking down the road for those that are going to come after us.
“Sure, making it smaller today might look like the right thing but I’ve been in Bremer county government for 45 years and space needs change. I don’t know where we would come up with the extra money to go forward with what we’re at. We promised that there would be no property tax (increase).”
Hildebrandt said he still did not want to increase property taxes.
“I just wonder if we should give another week to see if they can come up with some other way of getting a little closer to that number we had discussed.”
Daniels summarized, “Hearing the conversation I think it would be prudent to hear from ISG what a potential redesign would cost.”
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Update: Background about the amount by which phase two was over budget in early June and how the current budget reduction was achieved was appended to the third paragraph, after press time.