Redmond Trail bids well over budget
♦ County officials will try to negotiate some cost savings with the low bidder.
It’s been a decade since Floyd County received a Georgia Department of Transportation grant for the Redmond Trail Phase One project.
So it should not be a surprise that when bids were finally opened Friday, the low bid was well above the original $550,000 budget.
Lewallen Construction of Marietta submitted the lowest of three bids at $838,153. Excellere Construction of Marietta offered to do the work for $869,400 and Triscapes of Alpharetta was at $1,105,677. The grant is for $400,000. The trail segment is only about a quarter of a mile long. It will link the trail at the north end of the Oostanaula levee to the new Mount Berry Trail behind the U.S. Post Office off Martha Berry Highway.
The big ticket in the project is a bridge that will span Little Dry Creek. The project will also include a shelter for walkers and bikers under the Norfolk Southern Railroad trestle to protect against any debris coming off trains or the trestle.
Floyd County Purchasing Director Bill Gilliland said that, since the project gets funding from a GDOT grant, the county may only negotiate with the low bidder.
County Manager Jamie McCord said Lewallen is a very reputable company and did good work building the Kingfisher Trail along the Etowah River and Silver Creek.
“We had some issues on the Kingfisher and they were able to resolve them,” he said.
Jonathan Cash, an estimator and project manager for Lewallen, attended the bid opening. He said there could well be ways to reduce the cost of the project.
“That’s going to be up to the engineers to look at, I’m not familiar enough with the geotech to say anything definite,” he said. “We’re willing to work with the county to make this happen.”
Cash told Gilliland that the company found itself in a similar situation with the city of Newnan recently. He said the bid was over budget but they had been able to bring that project down by “several hundred thousand dollars.”
The history of the Redmond Trail project is linked to the creation of the local advocacy group TRED, Trails for Recreation and Economic Development. When the county initially received the GDOT grant, several county commissioners balked at coming up with the required local match. That prompted trails enthusiasts to create the nonprofit organization, which raised the money for the match in just a couple of weeks.
Since then, the primary hold up for the project has been getting approval of an easement under the railroad trestle from Norfolk Southern.
Even though there is no shelter to project the trail on the opposite side of the river, the railroad required that the county include a covering to protect hikers on the west side of the river.