By Patricia A. Scheyer
NKyTribune reporter
Taylor Mill CAO Brian Haney gave a report at the last regular commission meeting about the status of the firehouse project.
“Before you you’ve got two new contracts,” Haney told the commissioners. “An amended contract that we currently have with Mark Spaulding construction, and a new contract with Hub and Weber. It was recommended by the Kentucky League of Cities attorney to ensure strict adherence to the state procurement code that we modify our current design/build contract to a more traditional design/bid/build. To accomplish this I’m asking you to approve two contracts tonight, the first one will be an amendment to the Mark Spaulding construction that basically says they will now provide us with bid ready documents so that we can put the design of the firehouse out for bid.”
The second contract is with Hub and Weber so that the company can help the city with the bidding process, and they will also provide construction administration through the project.
Haney explained that city attorney Jack Gatlin was uncomfortable with the city using the design/build method of creating a new firehouse, so he suggested calling the Attorney for the Kentucky League of Cities, Morgain Patterson, for advice. She apparently said that method does not meet the requirements for the procurement code in the state of Kentucky, so she thought the city should go back to the old method of obtaining bids.
Haney said they didn’t have to go back too far, because the Mark Spaulding company already had pre-construction documents ready, so they just had to redo the documents to have them bid ready. They had to also line up a company to help them through the process of bidding.
“We had already interviewed four firms for the design/build process,” Haney explained. “They were already vetted.”
The first contract was voted on unanimously, but Commissioner Ed Kuehne asked to say something to further clarify what they were doing.
“We went through this all the way before, and who would be the winners of it, and so forth,” he said. “This is just a follow up to a state legislation that we could not do the design build that we originally designed with. This is taking the people that started out, several of us have been on the committee of putting everything together. We need to finalize it and then it will go out to bid for everybody to bid. So in essence, this is an engineering firm and a maintenance person putting everything together.”
He asked the audience if he was saying it clearly enough for everone to understand. Then he said it will all come together by the end of December and be ready to bid in January.
Commissioner Dan Murray explained that although there are several buildings around the state that are doing the exact same thing with the design/build approach, the KLC attorney said she didn’t think they could proceed with what they were doing.
Nevertheless, Murray said they were going to do it the way the attorney said to do it, and hopefully no one will come back to the city and accuse them of not doing the process correctly.
The second contract was approved unanimously also.