Despite the challenges of Seattle’s wild construction climate, we finally awarded the contract for construction of our New Maintenance Facility and work is now underway!
On February 12, after New West Construction completed the site preparation work in Phase I of our New Maintenance Facility, we received bids from three local companies for Phase II—the construction portion of the project. We were excited to finally embark on the final stage of our project…
Until all three bids came in higher than expected.
While it would have been ideal to build everything that we wanted and needed immediately, the bids were simply more expensive than we could afford.
On February 14, our Board of Commissioners directed NCWD staff to go back to the drawing board—either to reduce the project scope, or to find creative ways to phase the scope over multiple years—in order to achieve the facility we needed, within a reasonable budget and timeframe, despite Seattle’s current construction climate.
NCWD staff explored a variety of options, and came up with a reduced scope of work that would enable us address portions of the project in a phased schedule. This “repackaged” project scope went out for (re)bidding on March 12.
On April 2, we received… one bid.
Despite our initial disappointment over just one bid, we were encouraged by the contractor’s creative approach to addressing our scope, by allowing us to choose which aspects of the project were most critical, while still remaining within our budget.
Faber Construction Corporation’s base bid of $4,149,068 included everything in our reduced scope, for less than our original budget, along with three optional “add-on” alternatives:
- Alternative 1: include the Decant Building (one of the scope aspects we postponed)
- Alternative 2: expand Maintenance Building South by 4 bays (one of the scope aspects we reduced)
- Alternative 3: expand Maintenance Building South by 2 additional bays
Given that we’d originally budgeted $5,000,000 for this project, District staff recommended that the contract be awarded to Faber Construction for their base bid, plus Alternative 2 (4 extra bays) for a total of $4,947,668 (excluding Washington State sales tax).
However we included a clause in our contract with the construction company that stated, “Should additional funding become available, the District would also like to award Alternative 1 (the Decant Building) for a not-to-exceed amount of $474,000.” We spent the next two months closely monitoring our finances, and by the middle of June, were able to identify sufficient funds to award Alternative 1 as well.
On June 17, the contractor was given Notice to Proceed.
Work began immediately, and as of today (July 24), rebar is being installed for the main building foundation, concrete will be poured any day, and framing should begin in mid August. Excavation is also currently underway for the Decant Building. We expect the contractor to remain onsite until June of 2020.
All in all, these are exciting times for North City Water District. Stay tuned as we continue to update you about the progress on this long-awaited facility!