00:00:08,070	County Commission to order. first item on the agenda is roll call of members. Comm Woodcock. Yes, here here. Here’s here. The only other thing on the agenda is consideration of bids and awards for the provident remodel project. Alicia, you wanna Dan. that Yeah. Good afternoon, Commission.

00:00:44,470	All right, we had the bid opening for the Provident rebid last Thursday. So I’ll kind of run you through all of the numbers um on this with kind of a few explanations. So that first one is actually, uh, Northwest Contracting’s original bid from March 19th. We’ve been holding their bid.

00:01:03,230	We had 60 days to do so so that we could do the rebid, um, that 60 days is, is up this weekend, so that’s why we’re having the special meeting today to kind of make a final decision. So Northwest was. a low bidder for the general contractor bid back in March at about 5 million and change. We do suggest that, um, accepting the alternate in the original design, we had had uh.

00:01:24,600	Price estimates for both quarts and solid surface and during design quartz was cheaper, but during bidding, we kind of heard that solid surface, you know, that had kind of flipped, so we issued, uh, an alternate to be able to bid on solid surface and so that would be a deduct of 65,000 if we switch to solid surface instead of the

00:01:44,870	quartz, so. Um, for the new bids that were due last week. We had the bid for Herzog roofing, um, for a re-roof. Um, that was an alternate. Um, at this time, the roof is not leaking.

00:02:04,570	It was kind of recoded about a year ago, but we did want to have a price for that, um, with all the other work happening in the building if it made sense to do it at this time with, with the bids overall being high, um, right now we would suggest kind of waiting on that re-roof and maybe doing it, um, when you guys can look at the Verizon contract.

00:02:21,700	The contractors did bid this as if that Verizon um tower and all of their electrical wiring and everything up there. would be removed, um, with how much is up there, it would have to be relocated at a minimum temporarily just to be able to do the re-roof, um, so that might be something to kind of

00:02:38,600	budget for the future, so. We had 3 abatement contracts that were bid, um, environmental plant services, Horsley Specialties and and Safe checks bid did arrive late, so it was unopened. They mailed theirs and it was received by the auditor’s office at 11:30. So there’s where it was not opened.

00:03:04,330	Um, Horsley Specialties was the low bid at $322,000795. You flip over and go to the back. We had two bids for mechanical work, um, one from HJ Thompson and Sons, they had the. Low bid at 8,372,000 and then another bid from Peterson Sheet Metal.

00:03:35,400	The alternate they had would be in relation to the roof if we were to do the re-roof, there are some mechanical items up there that could be done at the same time. So that’s that $2000 alternate that you see. And then we had 3 electrical contractors bid. We had Feter Electric, Magnum, and Skills. Skills was the low bid at 2,923,459.

00:04:08,930	So In terms of our original budgeting, um, the abatement came in pretty much right on budget, general contractors came in under, um, electrical came in a little high and talking with them, some of the tariffs and things like that have gone up. And the mechanical did come in high, but um that’s the, the largest portion of the work of the building.

00:04:28,670	And some of that scope did grow from our original estimates a year ago that we did. So as more investigation of existing systems happened and just more things that needed to get repaired as we dug in. Any questions? Comm, any questions? Yeah, Dan’s got a few comments. A little bit further breakdown for you, um, Dan, Dan Shaw, HDG architects here.

00:05:03,930	So if you were to look at, um, taking the general contracting, the low, um, Northwest contracting, taking out the courts, the $60,000 so their, their total bid would be 4,969, 100, OK? If we don’t do the rough, we don’t do that 800,000 for the rough. We keep the asbestos abatement, the lull by Horsley specialties, that’s 320. 2007, 95.

00:05:31,200	We go with the mechanical and plumbing of HA Thompson and Sons being the low, the 8,372,000. And then we take the low electrical Skills Electric Company at 2,923, 459. The total overall budget would be 16 million. 587 354. I’ll repeat that. 16 million. 587 354.

00:06:06,400	And that’s removing the roof portion of the project and any alternates pertaining to that roof. OK. Thoughts, questions, concerns? I know it’s getting up there. Like I said, that bulk, the bulk is coming from the mechanical and the electrical. They’re the. The big portions of the project. I don’t know if I have any questions other than, A lot of concern with the dollars. Right.

00:06:47,070	Mhm I mean You expected To be correct. I get that. Um When we started this project, it was a clean carpets, paint and move. Could do this for a little bit, not a problem. I’m, I’m struggling. Understandable.

00:07:18,930	I have concerns over the dollar amount as well, but You know, this is a little bit of a cautionary tale if you extrapolate this out over 30 years of not doing. A maintenance schedule, uh, on a building, this is what you get.

00:07:41,270	So break this out over 30 years and the number’s better but it’s been pushed off and the can’s been kicked down the road for far too long and I can’t imagine these numbers are gonna go down for next year or the year after, the year after that. Nope. No, I don’t see any chance of that. No, there isn’t 0. And in walking through with the maintenance gentleman over there, um, they’re, they’re failing, the mechanicals failing over there. So to try to patch in the fin tube. It’s a band-aid.

00:07:59,930	I mean, you’re gonna be spending, it’s, and it’s not gonna be cheap. You’re gonna be spending money and you’re, you’re gonna be constantly working on it. Um, they’re getting to the point where the boilers in the in the components that are in there, they’re having a hard time getting parts for them.

00:08:14,530	Yeah, well, the last time I was over there, there had, uh parts laying around on the floor where they were trying to replace some of the tubes and the. Different stuff and it was just, well, some of the same issues we ran in with the courthouse. It’s when you push stuff off too, too long, you wind up costing the taxpayers more money in the long run.

00:08:33,670	So There’s some sticker shock with this number, but when you put it out over 30 years and the failing of not having a good maintenance program in place and upgrading equipment on a regular schedule like you should. This is the number you get.

00:08:50,200	It’s easier to swallow when you break it, Divide it by 30. It’s a better number. But in 30 years. Wow. Well, you could, but I don’t think that. Unless the finance department can get really creative. I don’t I don’t think that, you know, the simple fact is we did set aside some money for this with the ARPA funds.

00:09:13,200	And secondary to that, we do have sufficient funds on hand to move forward with the project. Anyway, Comm Schwab. I, uh, am looking at this, Ask me if I’d be close or not. According to this, I would estimate a building like that to be built for about 51 million.

00:09:36,670	Would I be correct? Yeah, during one of the previous commission meetings we provided that cost estimate and it was right about that 50 million to build a similar building new. Well, we don’t have $50 million no, we, we can do this one. How do you want? How do you want to go about approving these individually. Um, well, we have accepted the General contractors bid.

00:10:06,070	We haven’t, we haven’t made it official, but um I think accepting those bids and a motion to move forward based on that is probably our only option at this point. Yeah, it’s going to cost you a million dollars every 6 months.

00:10:29,200	You and I did have a conversation with the finance staff, um, regarding possibilities of bonding and whatnot, um, and that originally started because of the situation with the sales tax and the jail where we had, we were getting better interest rates. Uh, with the investments than we would we were paying with the bonds.

00:10:51,470	Well, that has flipped now to where uh in my understanding is that the bond prices or the the it would cost more to do a bond than it simply would be just paying cash, so, um, unless the finance director has any additional information on that? Nothing additional. It’s Pretty clear, so I’m ready to accept these low bids. They’re not going to change in the next half hour. No, we’ve we’ve rebid this now a couple of times. Yeah. Because of that.

00:11:29,830	That’s enough. Yeah. Is that a motion? Yeah, it’s a motion. Second. I motion a second to accept the bids, um, and move forward. Exactly. Any further discussion? Mr. Chair. Mr.

00:11:53,970	Woodcoxck before we go jumping in the $17 million project that we, you talked briefly about how we’re gonna pay for this, but uh we did a low cost loan on uh McKenzie Hall Road with Bank of North Dakota.

00:12:09,930	Has anybody, that was a state program, I think at the time that was doing that, but uh if we talk with them anything about a low cost loan, are they available or anything like that? I hate to commit to and what kind of a commitment are we actually? making, if we approve these low low bids, I mean, is that a an ironclad commitment and now we have to find out how to pay for it. Yes, that, that would be an ironclad commitment. It was 165873354, 16587.

00:12:34,630	And I think we can certainly look into whether there’s a low-cost development loan or something through the Bank of North Dakota, um, because we, we have not done that that I’m aware of. Lee. Um, but we can certainly do that because we have time to decide whether we take that route or not.

00:12:50,100	Well, that was my question. We do have time, uh, if we go to a bonding rate, what is that bond, what are bonds going at now? Lee you have any information on that? 4.5, 5%, something like that. Yeah, I was, I was thinking in that 4.

00:13:12,930	7, but, You might have Chair Commissioners, uh, Comm Woodcoxx, my recollection of my conversation with our Bond guys was a, a comparable county a month or 6 weeks ago, got 4.25. percent on a, I think it was a 15 year, uh, bond of similar amount of money. So 4.25, your mileage may vary a little bit.

00:13:36,930	So we’d be committing how much from ARPA money and the rest we’d be financing at about $10 million or something like that, is that correct? Close. That’s close, yeah. That’s close. OK, thank you. But in the meantime, I think we’ll just direct staff to um Um, look into any other possible options in the lock in any other investment rates that would apply.

00:14:06,330	How’s that, Comm? Mr. Chair, we talked about construction time or anything like that? Is this because we were talking about a commitment of maybe a two-year time and then maybe if we clean some of, you know, move some people out, it would be only a year longer have we firmed that up at all? Yes, we have, um, when you want

00:14:21,470	to speak a little bit to that? Yes, we have a Comm. OK. What did we end up with? I think we’re still at about, uh, 2 to 2.5 years. We looked at the phasing, um, and there’s not, uh, from my understanding, a, a good place to put uh human services as of right now.

00:14:40,070	So the, the current plan is for them to remain in the building unless something has changed from the last time we spoke, um, but the project would be done in, in two large phases, um, and take about, uh, between 2 and 2.5 years. That timeline would be firmed up with all of the prime bidders.

00:14:55,870	We’d bring them all to the table and to discuss that timeline and kind of finalize that with the group. OK, thank you. OK. Any other questions, concerns? no. Comm Munsen. No. Comm Bakken. Comm Schwab, Comm Woodcock. Yes. Bitner, yes, motion carries. There being no other business on the agenda for the special