Carbon rejects $4.9M building bid

The Carbon County Commissioners want to add new office space in downtown Jim Thorpe to alleviate crowded county offices, but they are committed to do so at a cost that is responsible for taxpayers.

The commissioners voted unanimously Thursday to reject the sole bid they received for the first phase of the Susquehanna Street building project, a $4.9 million bid from Slaw Precast to provide the precast concrete forms that will form the basis of the proposed three-story office building and parking garage.

“We want to get it right. We want to get it done efficiently at the least cost to the taxpayers that we can,” said Commissioner William O’Gurek. “So that causes us to revisit all of this, and take a step back and rebid, and go forward from that point on.”

The commissioners have proposed a three-story building with parking on the first two levels and 25,000 square feet of office space on the third floor. The building would be located across the street from Woods Ice Cream, where the county currently has a parking lot.

It will involve demolishing an old county archive building at 44 Susquehanna and removing 20,000 yards of rock from the hill behind the parking lot. There will be no blasting used to remove the rock because of the historic St. Mark and St. John Episcopal Church, which sits just uphill from the proposed site.

The commissioners also agreed unanimously to readvertise their request for bids for the precast work, as well as seven other “prime” contracts for the project — general, rock removal, elevator, fire protection, mechanical and electrical.

Readvertising the precast work will set back the project’s timeline by about a month.

They hoped to complete most of the work before Jim Thorpe’s Fall Foliage Festival, which brings thousands of tourists to the borough over three weekends in October.

The commissioners said the bid they received exceeded by about one-third the estimates provided by their project manager, Boyle Construction of Allentown.

The proposed bid involved a subcontractor traveling from Ohio to do steel erection work.

Commissioners’ Chairman Wayne Nothstein said the ambitious timeline for the project may be to blame for the high bid cost. The commissioners hoped to have the parking deck in place well before the festival.

Now, they anticipate having to work through the festival.

Nothstein said the new bid will probably include a clause that no work can take place on festival weekends, but completely shutting down the project during the month of October would escalate the cost of the project.

“In the interest of cost, we have no choice,” Nothstein said of working through October.

O’Gurek said in light of the high bid the county received, and the lack of competition for the contract, the commissioners may want to slow down the project in the interest of protecting taxpayers.

County offices have long outgrown their office space in the historic courthouse on Hazard Square. The district attorney’s office, adult probation and sheriff’s office are the most constrained.

Nothstein said other small counties in the region are dealing with the same problems — Pike County recently built a new courthouse and Monroe County is considering one.

He said the office space needs to be located near the existing courthouse because workers in those offices regularly go back and forth to court.

“They’re all shoulder to shoulder in those offices. There is no more room,” he said.

Nothstein said the commissioners have been looking at options for office space for about three years. They attempted to buy or rent space in existing buildings downtown, but couldn’t agree on a cost.

“They always wanted more money than it was worth or wanted us to pay for renovations including rent,” Nothstein said. “We decided we had to bite the bullet and move on.”