College Township Council discusses over-budget Spring Creek Park restroom project

Council discussed the Spring Creek Park restroom project at its meeting Thursday.

The total of the low bids for the three trade contracts is $427,127 — $132,044 more than the township estimated for the project to build a new restroom facility.

Mid-State Construction bid $328,545, K&K Plumbing bid $54,786 and Heritage Electric bid $43,796.

Kent Baker, township engineer, proposed various changes to council that could reduce the cost of the project to $338,572.

The contractors worked with the township in “earnest” to help reduce costs, he said.

The changes would be in material not scope of the project, Baker said.

Other options would include rebidding the project — with no guarantee that the bids would be lower — or going back to the drawing board to reduce the footprint of the project, which may not end up saving money because of associated design costs.

Several members of council said they should have been alerted when the project started going over budget.

Councilman Steven Lyncha said he was interested in knowing how the project got to this point.

Daniel Miller, of Pennoni Associates, said when they met with Centre Region Parks and Recreation, they were told to increase the toilet count from six to eight and the sink count from four to six and to add a family restroom.

He said he didn’t feel it was worth revisiting the project in engineering, and that he’d hope that council would move ahead with the project, getting construction started in the fall.

A “disservice” has been done to the taxpayers, Lyncha said, but at some point the township needs to “stop the bleeding.”

Council passed a motion, 4-0, to have contracts negotiated that reduce the total cost of the project as Baker suggested, contingent that the changes don’t compromise the integrity of the bid process.

This story was originally published August 3, 2017 at 9:58 PM with the headline "College Township Council discusses over-budget Spring Creek Park restroom project."