Dropping courthouse work one option to save on Floyd County LEC project costs

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Floyd County supervisors could trim about $1.4 million from the cost of the law enforcement center project, but that would mean making none of the planned updates to the courthouse.

The supervisors spoke via phone with their project construction manager during their regular meeting Tuesday morning. They tabled taking any action on the bids until a special meeting scheduled for next Monday, Sept. 30.

Sid Samuels, owner and president of The Samuels Group, has been working on ways to trim costs ever since bids came in earlier this month about $4.6 million above the $13.5 million that voters approved spending on the project.

In addition to the $1.4 million that could be saved by not doing the new heating and air conditioning, windows and other updates at the courthouse, Samuels said he could probably get about $300,000 in savings by making some changes in the law enforcement center (LEC) project.

“It’s not as easy as saying we’re just going to cut something out,” Samuels said. “It takes engineering and a lot of these guys, because we haven’t done the engineering yet to show it on the document, these are estimates,” he said, referring to the numbers he has been getting from the bidders since he asked them to try to find ways to reduce costs.

The LEC with its new county jail has been the driving force behind the project. The state jail inspector has said for years that the current county jail, located on the top floor of the courthouse, is inadequate and unsafe both for the detainees and the county employees who work there.

But it would be a significant blow to many county officers and employees, and to others, if the updates to the courthouse have to be abandoned.

For example, there is currently no central air conditioning in the courthouse, and more than 50 individual room air conditioners stick out from virtually every window in the building. There is also no fire sprinkler system in the building.

Supervisor Linda Tjaden said the county is looking at alternate sources of funding, and repeated Tuesday what she has said in the past that the county should be making needed updates to the courthouse as part of its regular annual budgeting.

She said Jeff Heil, of the county’s bond underwriter, Northland Securities, would also be at the special meeting next Monday.

During the meeting Tuesday the supervisors discussed a number of options with Samuels, such as reducing the number of new elevators from two to one, or reducing the number of beds or the square footage in the new jail.

Samuels said it is not required that there be one elevator for the public and another for the sheriff’s department to take detainees to and from the courtrooms on the third and fourth floors of the courthouse.

The separate elevators had been designed as a safety feature. Those and other steps in the design of the new LEC were made to prevent escorted detainees from crossing paths with the public, as can happen at many points in the existing courthouse.

Samuels noted that the 32-bed capacity of the jail was based on at least two studies, and had as much to do with the classification of prisoners as the number. For example, detainees must be separated by gender, age, seriousness of the crime, etc.

Reducing the number of jail beds or square footage of the LEC could have an impact, but some expensive items such as the control center would be required for the jail regardless of the number of beds.

Samuels said the supervisors need to be careful in their decisions, because leaving some things out now might not be able to be added back in future years if it changes the construction.

Also, he said, going through another redesign of the project and rebidding might cost nearly as much as a new design saves — “We just chased ourselves in a circle and we didn’t get as far as we thought we’d get.”

Supervisor Doug Kamm said a redesign shouldn’t cost the county anything, implying again what he has stated before that the designers and architects for the project, Prochaska & Associates, should bear much of the blame for the original cost estimates being so far off what the actual bids were.

Tjaden said a representative of Prochaska would also be at the Monday special meeting.

Samuels said he will keep working on the numbers to present his latest estimates and recommendations next Monday, but said there are limits to what can be cut.

“If you recall,” he said, “we started talking about budgets in February and we actually already went in and started cutting a lot of this. That’s what becomes very difficult, is, we went through this process once before.

“And so we’re doing it again and it’s kind of like we keep taking from it, taking from it — we’re kind of at that point where I just don’t know what else to take from it.

“The list isn’t very large, and the reason is because we went through this exercise once before,” he said.