Bid committee looking at savings for paving project

Taxpayers can expect the price tag for items the county is seeking through SPLOST dollars to continue to rise in the foreseeable future, but not enough to keep from ensuring capital expenditures already planned can move forward.

Everything from vehicles to contract paving has seen rising costs, but where one dollar is spent on an item, another needs to be saved elsewhere.

That’s what the county hopes to achieve in the two bids officials received back for the cost of widening, repairing and resurfacing Cherokee Road.

A project t he state awarded the county an extra $300,000 to achieve is coming in much higher than expected. When opening cost estimates during the April 18 bid committee meeting, Coun- ty Manager Matt Denton said he could have fainted.

“That is well over what we expected this project to cost,” Denton said.

Bidders included C.W. Matthews who sought a cost of $ 865,325 for the project and Northwest Georgia Paving who put in an estimate of $1,104,498.68 for the work. Those are lump sum prices for completing the resurfacing and widening project, which also had aggressive repairs to the roadway as part of the specifications for contractors to complete.

If the county were to accept the low bid as it stands, they would have to chunk over more than $560,000 to complete the work.

Denton and Assistant County Manager Barry Atkinson said they would go back and try to complete value engineering on the work, and potentially have to put the project back out to bid. The pair also said later in the week during the Public Works meeting they would look at ways to reduce the overall cost.

For instance, Denton pointed out that in the C.W. Matthews bid, they sought a price of more than $100,000 in their cost estimate for traffic control. Atkinson said that is an area that will be hard to control in a lump sum bid since it is an area where contractors can stick in additional profit margins for themselves.

The problem is the county requested bids on the project for a lump total sum — materials, equipment, labor and all — from contractors instead of unit pricing. Had they gone with the latter, costs could be controlled and contractors forced to take a contract that they’d exceed an amount no more than $X dollars per thousand feet, for instance.