Cookeville City Council will vote Thursday to approve a bid for pre-construction services for the new Energy Department Headquarters.
Energy Department Director Carl Haney said the headquarters has been in design over the past year. Haney said the city received just one bid after performing requests for qualifications. Haney said the lone bid came from W&O Construction.
“I will note on this that their bid is the same percentage and cost as far as they did for the fire station last year, so there was no increase in the percentages of the cost,”, Haney said. “Actually, the bond amount actually went down a percentage of it so that was a plus in it.”
The company has done pre-construction services for other city projects including fire stations two and three and the police station. The lone bid came out to be $1. City Manager James Mills said the very low bid amount gives the city an out if bids for the project come in too high.
“We still could get to that point and reject all of this and we owe a dollar,” Mills said. “We can go through all of this and get the estimates and if we decide this is not doable we can back out. That’s the reason we like this and the other is that and kudos to Peter (Architect Peter Metts), He’s let us do this with the police department and we are doing the same process for the fire department, so far especially for the police department it worked out really well so we think is the right way to go.”
Metts said W&O will handle the bidding process for the project and will come up with a cost estimate for the project.
“We will do this three times during the engineering process,” Metts said. “The first thing we will do is drop the drawings in their laps and everyone could establish an initial budget to see how close we are to the present projected budget.”
Metts said they will ask contractors to re-budget multiple times. Metts said W&O could propose something to the city for the first time as soon as four weeks.
