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11/04/2012 11:00 PMWESTBROOK - Now what? The Town Garage Building Committee, after receiving the construction bids, faces a challenge. What should the committee tell town leaders now that the lowest bid for a new Town Garage was about $100,000 to $200,000 higher than the estimated $1.2 million town garage budget?
"We'll be meeting next week to evaluate the lowest three bidders and their bids. We will do scope reviews for those bids and then determine how we want to proceed," said Town Garage Building Committee Chairman Tony Marino.
The lowest bid the committee received was $1,273,900 for the base bid and $1,442,900 for the base bid plus two added scopes; it was submitted by Diggs Construction of Hartford. The second lowest bid came from Nosal Builders of Durham and was $1,319,500 for the base scope and $1,559,100 for the base bid plus the options.
In a public bidding process, the town usually awards the contract to the lowest qualified bidder that is responsive to the bid specifications.
The construction budget was set at about $1.2 million because that is the amount not yet spent of the $1.5 million the state gave the town to pay for a new town garage. Some of the original grant funds, around $250,000, was spent already to pay for other project costs, including site clean-up and the engineering services of Weston & Sampson.
So now the Town Garage Building Committee and town leaders have to decide what to do next.
One option would be to ask the town to contribute some funds toward the project to supplement the $1.2 million the state has already provided. If the committee recommends this option, town leaders and the town meeting would be asked to approve the extra funds.
One option to find outside funding might be to tap the $271,000 reimbursement received recently from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the town's Tropical Storm Irene-related costs. Although the town has already paid for the labor and capital rebuilding projects in the last fiscal year, the reimbursement of eligible costs arrived only recently, nearly one year later.
So why did the town need to rebuild its public works garage at all? Because the state Department of Transportation (DOT) needed the Norris Avenue Town Garage parcel to expand and upgrade the Shore Line East train station. A land trade was negotiated: the town's Norris Avenue site for the state's road maintenance site on Route 145.
Seven years ago the town's electors approved the land swap deal once the state DOT also agreed to give the town $1.5 million to pay the town to build a new public works garage.
The new public works garage planned for the Route 145 site is a rectangular building that will be constructed parallel to and near the Route 145 road right of way. Built on a concrete slab, the new building's exterior walls will be concrete block on the bottom and metal on the top. The interior spaces will include public works department office space, a kitchen, bathrooms, shower facilities, one vehicle maintenance bay, and one vehicle wash bay.
The bid specifications also asked bidders to price two optional scopes that the public works department originally wanted as part of the facility. Alternate One was the addition of one more vehicle maintenance bay; Alternate Two was the addition of one additional bay for storage.
Whether the optional scopes are completed as part of the project will depend on the discussions and decisions of the Town Garage Building Committee this month.