Boyle Construction project manager and professional engineer Tony Ganguzza, who guided the Township project team through the contract awarding process, had this to say to the building team. Please see the Board of Commissioners Press Release as well. See link at the bottom of the article.
Team, just a few words about the awarding of the municipal contracts for the construction of the Township’s administration, police, and public works buildings—an effort long-time coming.
First, the building team did an outstanding job in organizing the bids so that the Township was in the best position on bid day. We had a base bid that included the essentials for completing the administration and police buildings as well as the associated site work.
The building team strategically added the public works building option to the base bid so, if the Township decided to go with that option, there would not be any rework needed to the overall bid package.
Realizing the Township was cost-conscious, the building team wove in several electives into the project design so, if the bids came in lower, they could add electives to the project and increase the effectiveness of the design. Accordingly, since the price for the public works option was very good and realizing that price escalation is about 5% each year, the building team decided to recommend the public works building and sallyport electives to the Board of Commissioners. A very good move.
We had an unprecedented 49 bidders for 5 prime contracts. In managing over 40 projects in the last 13 years, we have never had, by far, this many bidders on a project. This escalated the competition and created very good bid results.
The 5 low bids were slightly more than $1.3M under budget. This is unheard of in this day and age of public bidding.
We included $500k in allowance contingency in the project to protect the township against negotiated change orders.
Overall, the Township did an exceptional job in planning and designing this project, and the bid results (excellent results) reflected that hard work, thanks Tony.