Carbon opens bids for project

A proposed three-story office building and parking garage in Jim Thorpe will cost upward of $12.7 million to construct based on bids that Carbon County officials opened Thursday.

Thirty bids were received for the eight contracts for the Susquehanna Street building project, which will include a two-level, 110-space secured parking garage and 25,000 square feet of office space and will be situated in the current parking lot of the 76 Susquehanna offices.

Slaw Precast of Lehighton, which submitted a bid for the precast work before, was the sole bidder for precast concrete at $3.92 million. This amount was nearly $1 million lower than the previous quote that was rejected in December.

Bracy of Allentown submitted the lowest of three bids for general construction. The company bid $4,862,000. There were five alternate options, which include demolition of the maintenance building and other details to the new building that could increase the final price based on what the county chooses to go with.

D&M Construction Unlimited Inc. of Clarks Summit submitted the sole bid of $1,099,622.73 for rock removal at the site prior to the project beginning.

The project requires the removal of 20,000 yards of rock from the mountain to make enough space for the building, but area organizations and businesses like St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, which sits right above where the building will be and is built with the mountain as its foundation, have many concerns.

Tony Ganguzza, vice president of professional services for the project manager, Boyle Construction of Allentown, said if D&M gets the contract, it would be responsible for completing testing requirements. Results would be reviewed with the geotechnical engineer to decide whether to proceed.

The county has already said that it would also be doing vibration monitoring while the excavation is taking place, which would alert the contractor to any issues.

“It’s extremely important to the church (St. Mark’s) and the commissioners, so we’re going to do our very best that it’s done correctly and at a pace that nothing goes wrong,” Ganguzza said.

Schindler Elevator Corporation of Allentown submitted the sole bid of $79,500 for the elevator construction; Davis-Ulmer Sprinkler Co. Inc. of Beach Lake submitted the lowest of seven bids at $217,900 for fire protection work; JBM Mechanical Inc. of Nazareth submitted the lowest of five bids at $396,000 for plumbing construction; Tri-County Mechanical Inc. of East Texas submitted the lowest of 10 bids at $706,000 for mechanical construction; and Orlando Diefenderfer Electrical Inc. of Allentown submitted the lowest of two bids at $1,338,500 for electrical construction.

Start delayed

Ganguzza said that the project construction timeline has been pushed back approximately four weeks because of rebidding the precast contract.

The precast, which is the shell of the building, is now expected to be erected in the middle of August instead of in July. This should take six to seven weeks, which means it could affect the Fall Foliage Festival in the town in October.

“We’re going to do our best and get as much done by the time Fall Foliage starts,” Ganguzza said.

The anticipated completion date is early 2020.

The county will now review the bids and set the timeline to either award the contract or reject the bids at the commissioners’ meeting in two weeks.

Prior to the bids being opened, Penn Forest Township resident Shawn Kresge asked the commissioners if they looked at any other locations for this building.

Commissioners’ Chairman Wayne Nothstein said that the issue is that the offices going in the building are court-related and have to be in close proximity to the courthouse.

He cited parking and time issues with traveling if the building wasn’t close as one of the reasons the county chose the site it did.

Kresge also asked about either restructuring the courthouse and administrative building to make more space instead of building a new office building, or thinking about purchasing an existing structure such as the Franklin Elementary School and moving noncourt-related offices there.

Nothstein said that it is not an easy task moving a county seat out of a municipality after it was established there.

He also said that the administrative offices have a close relationship with the courts in that administration and courts work together on things and shouldn’t be distances apart.

“A lot was involved in this decision,” Nothstein said.

Carbon County has been working on building additional office space since 2016 when the commissioners refinanced the county’s bonds to free up approximately $7 million for capital projects.

Those include constructing a maintenance building at the upper end of the county parking lot, relocating the archives office to the east side of Jim Thorpe and matching grant requirements for the proposed multiuse fire training facility in Nesquehoning.