Saving the Bristol public safety building

BRISTOL — The selectboard is hoping that a review of the bids on the town’s new public safety building will provide the information they need to find savings on a project that is about $601,000 over budget before it even begins.

Fire Chief Ben LaRoche and Police Chief Jim McIntire brought the bad news to the selectboard on Jan. 5.

“Obviously, that’s a substantial amount of money and it’s not money that was approved,” LaRoche said.

Voters, in a 103-56 vote on March 12, 2022, approved a plan to tear down the old police station and replace it with a $4.9 million public safety building serving both the police and fire departments. Groen Builders, Inc., of Rochester, envisioned a building that could operate with at least a 50% reduction in electric and fuel costs from what those departments currently pay.

Although the town quickly secured the necessary financing, Groen was unable to post the necessary bond to guarantee the project’s completion, causing a delay in the work. When underwriting became more favorable, Groen was able to post the bond, and preconstruction work got underway toward the end of the summer. By December, they were ready to put the project out to bid.

LaRoche said they were given a heads-up that they probably would be looking at making some cutbacks in the plan once the bids were in because of inflation. However, when the two chiefs next met with Groen, “we walked into that [meeting] a little blind and, unfortunately, the first number we saw is that their projected cost for the project was up $601,000 after bidding.”

LaRoche and McIntire were able to find $207,000 in savings by eliminating items they can postpone, but the other $400,000 will be harder to find, they said.

Groen denied using the typical 10% markup when estimating costs, meaning that it would require significant changes to bring costs down, LaRoche said.

One possibility is removing the radiant heating slab in the apparatus bay, a feature that Farmington’s building, which serves as something of a model for this one, has found a great booster of energy efficiency.

Eliminating the rear parking lot is another way of saving a large amount of money, but that would mean the other parking area would be full from the day the building opened. To tackle that lot later would be much more expensive, due to rising costs and the fact that there then would be a building in the way of the equipment.

By obtaining the actual bid documents now held by Groen, LaRoche said they would be able to see if there is a lot of “fluff” that was adding to the price.

“Jim and I would really like to see who those contractors are,” LaRoche said. “Who did and didn’t bid on this, because we’ve already talked to local companies that would take on this type of project that either were given information that led them not to bid or weren’t contacted even though they requested to be on the bid list.”

LaRoche said that they might not be able to bridge the $400,000 gap, “but at least maybe that can salvage either the whole project as we anticipated or salvage some of those other things like radiant floor heating that you can’t go back in and do afterward.”

Selectboard Chair Shawn Lagueux said he would sign a letter asking for the bid documents as a way of expediting their review so they might still get bid documents signed by the end of the month.