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| Commission considers jail planners |
| By allegannews.com |
| Published: 05/28/2009 |
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By Daniel Pepper Allegan County commissioners heard presentations at their meeting Thursday, May 21, about two visions of how to plan and build a new jail. The board took no action, but did weigh the merits of having a construction manager handle a jail project compared with the services of the jail planning firm Carter Goble Lee, which had been recommended by county administration as the best bid for a jail planner. Commissioners put accepting that bid on hold in April and have continued to explore an alternate process called a charette. Charette Jack Krause, of the construction management firm Construction Control Inc., laid out for commissioners how the process of holding a charette and hiring a construction manager could work. “A charette is a meeting where they put the professionals in a room, sometimes with an owner, and go through it,” Krause said. “The biggest issue is speed.... “What you need is everyone in one place at one time, making the concessions that are needed to get things off the ground.” Commissioner Steve McNeal asked Krause to outline an advantage of the construction manager process. “I want as many of these jobs to go to people in Allegan County and to firms that pay property taxes in Allegan County,” McNeal said. “You’re saying that this is a better way to do that?” Krause said that in his experience it was, because construction managers would generally break the work on the job up into smaller pieces. He said that a construction manager would only take the county’s interest into account, because his firm was only a construction manager. “If I’m a construction manager one day and general contractor the next day, say I have a problem with a roofer and I need to step on him to get him back in line,” Krause said. “How do you know I’m doing that the best I can if I need him on another job when I’m a general contractor the next day?” He said that a construction manager would be able to referee the project. “If you put a planner and an architect in a room, they’ll try to outdo each other,” Krause said. “That creates an adversarial situation.” He said the county had done everything it needed to do to start the project. “The process to date, and I’ve been doing this a long time, is proof you’ve done your due diligence,” Krause said. His vision of a pre-millage process would include creating a schematic design with elevations and site evaluation (estimated cost: $30,000-$35,000), construction and project management services, (estimated cost: $20,000-$25,000) and financial services (estimated cost: $10,000-$15,000). Krause said a jail planner provides a large variety of services that weren’t needed. “If you have the professionals and choose them for the right reasons, you don’t need a planner,” Krause said. The National Institute of Corrections, he said, recommended jail planners because it had to put in place standards that would stop municipalities from making the worst mistakes. Jail planner Robert Goble of Carter Goble Lee outlined his firm’s new proposal. It would cost the county $257,132 and would cover the process from now until the millage vote. The county would then have a new process to hire a firm to help them the rest of the way through the project after they passed a millage. The Carter Goble Lee proposal would cover some architectural design and the marketing effort of holding meetings around the county to educate the public on the millage plans. “That’s what we’d recommend to get up to a solid cost estimate and a schematic design and get to the millage vote,” Goble said. County administrator Rob Sarro asked the board what it needed to continue. Sarro said he was going to speak to Kalamazoo County, because they used the charette process to create a juvenile home. “How do you want us to get that information to you?” Sarro said.Read more. If link has expired, check the website of the article's original news source. |
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