Morrone pushes for progress on county building project
MEDIA >> Even before the arrival of this week’s snow and rain, Delaware County Council Vice Chairman Colleen Morrone warned of the “mud pit” that would emerge on the site of the former Toal and Sweeney buildings.
In the summer, the county moved ahead with demolishing those buildings after a concrete wall section on top of one of the parking ramps inside the garage there had become separated from its welds. No one was hurt but many were inconvenienced as potential jurors had to find alternate parking arrangements and county employees in offices formerly in the Toal and Sweeney buildings had to be relocated.
County officials have known for some time that there were issues with those facilities.
In January 2017, Delaware County Council approved a $78,200 contract with Lawrenceville, N.J.based Joseph Jingoli & Son Inc. to begin predesign work for demolition of the garage and for construction of a facility there that was estimated at the time to cost approximately $50 million.
A year before that, county officials had to temporarily close the garage and then some parking spaces were blocked.
Last Wednesday, Morrone implored her colleagues to move forward with the project.
“We have a parking lot that has now been taken down and a building and, thankfully, it was done very quickly, it was done safely and it is now down,” she said. “But, we have a mud pit across the street and no plans to replace that structure.”
Morrone spoke of the employees who have to negotiate their way to get to work whereas previously it was done with ease.
“We’ve got employees that are been displaced from offices that have been moved into other places and month after month, I’m just not seeing the attention given to replacing this building structure across the street,” she said.
In August, council county council unanimously approved Jingoli to oversee the emergency demolition of the Orange Street parking garage and the Sweeney and Toal buildings for an amount not to exceed $230,706.
County officials anticipated that the project could require 18 months to design and another 18 months to build and that doesn’t include the process to obtain the appropriate approvals, which could make the project take four to five years in total.
With that in mind, Morrone asked for the project to move ahead.
“We have plans that are preliminarily developed and I believe that we need to push forward and come to some resolution and have a plan in place for what is going to occur across the street,” she said.