News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Cookeville City Council will consider an agreement Thursday allowing architects to subcontract the city’s new police station project.
Peter Metts is the Presient of American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He explained the process takes the conventional ‘design-bid-build’ method, and splits the bidding into two parts.
“What we have started doing is carving out the general contractor and his internal costs, separating them, and bidding those portions of the work to the general contractors,” Metts said. “What that does is still competitively bid their presence, bring them on earlier in the design process, and then they work with us through the rest of the design as a service only.”
Metts presented the idea before city officials during Monday’s work session. He said the process allows projects to finish quickly and smoothly.
“With projects like this, there’s a tendency to have a bit of ‘scope creep’ that starts after you are designing, Metts said. “You start adding more to the project, but it’s hard to control and hard to identify the additional cost that you incur. With a separate entity in place, they simply give you a cost and then they step away. You design it, they step back, you pay them again, they estimate it, and they give you a cost.”
The process requires three sealed bids to be submitted to the primary contractor. Those bids are looked over by the city and AEI with the primary contractor’s operating costs in mind.
Metts said the contractor will be required to accept the lowest bid for subcontract work unless the city and AEI find any issue with the company or bid. The process has previously been used by Putnam County officials to construct the county services building.
Council members will consider accepting the proposal Thursday at 5:30 p.m. during their regularly-scheduled meeting.
