Contractor extends school bid; boards to meet
Posted on Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 2:22 pm
MILFORD – The Caroline County School Board has received – and accepted – an extension from the low bidder for the Bowling Green School project.
The extension from Ashland-based A.D. Whittaker Construction Inc. will allow more time for county officials to get additional information they are seeking related to the project.
The School Board held a special meeting on Friday of last week to consider the extension, which the company offered by letter dated Dec. 16. The extension is good to Jan. 12.
The three members of the School Board who were present for the meeting, chairman Mack Wright Jr., Wendell Sims and Margaret Watkins, voted unanimously to accept the extension.
The School Board and Board of Board of Supervisors have made tentative plans to hold a second joint meeting about the building project on Jan. 5.
The supervisors heard a request from Wright at their meeting last week for more funds for the project but deferred action until January.
One reason for the delay was the supervisors are seeking to clarify how wage rates from the federal Davis-Bacon Act will apply to the project. The law mandates what wage rates contractors must pay for building projects using federal funds.
The project, to both expand and renovate Bowling Green Primary School, will rely in part on $6 million in federal funds. The higher wage rates mandated under the Davis-Bacon Act will add about 9 percent to the cost of the project.
However, there was a difference among some officials at the board’s meeting about how the law would apply to the project, whether only to the $6 million of federal funds or to the total cost of the project, which has yet to be finalized but could be in the range of $9-$12.5 million.
Randy Jones, senior vice president of Blacksburg-based OWPR, the School Board’s architectural and engineering consultant, said that, based on the experience of other localities, the Davis-Bacon wage rates would apply to the total cost of the project. Ben Emerson, the county’s legal counsel, was of the opinion the wage rates would only apply to the portion of the project involving federal funds. Deferring the decision presumably will enable the supervisors to obtain a definitive answer to the question.
The construction company’s bid already had been extended to Dec. 20, and officials attempted to contact them during the meeting of the supervisors to ascertain if they would be willing to extend it further.
The bids for the building project, which would allow the consolidation of Bowling Green Elementary School, came in higher than expected. The construction budget was $8.5 million, but the low bid was $3.5 million higher.
The School Board approved cuts, reductions, and other savings to reduce the cost of the project by $922,000 and initially sought an additional $2.5 million to pay for the project. A majority of the supervisors, however, did not favor going higher than the original $9 million.
The School Board subsequently rescinded the cuts they made and agreed to ask the supervisors for the full amount, $12.5 million. At last week’s meeting of the supervisors, school officials presented detailed information about the project to enable the supervisors to impose cuts if they so wish.
