County considers help for Orchard Hill facilities

WASHINGTON — County supervisors on Tuesday morning considered hiring Carl A. Nelson to aid in plans for Orchard Hill, a project that would involve moving most county offices out to the facility on the northwest reaches of town.

“It might help push things along since we are in a time-sensitive scenario since the thought process was to spend ARPA money to do this,” Supervisor Marcus Fedler said. “We start dragging our feet and not moving that general direction, we probably won’t get there in time.”

That window is narrowed by market trends, as material prices climb across the board.

“There’s not a lot of incentive to wait a long time to do this even though you have a few years,” Carl A. Nelson Business Development Director Dan Culp said. “Cost is increasing rapidly all the time right now. It’s not like it used to be where costs would go up maybe once or twice a year, it’s weekly right now. So keeping that in mind, whatever we’re doing, time is really a big factor in keeping the cost down.”

Fedler, who leads the county’s facility committee, said the outside help would ensure accurate planning.

“Richard asked me to be in charge of the facilities committee, I think it would require more of my time than would be good for the county,” he said. “To have somebody that knows the current environment — I’ve got a lot of history, but not currently — knows the current environment better, knows contractors better, knows that sort of thing better, that that schedule could be much better served.”

Other supervisors said they were optimistic about the proposal, citing other work the company had done in the community.

"I was involved with the emergency communications center and all that, and if it wasn’t for your company, the design phase and especially in the construction management phase, it wouldn’t have come out as successfully as it did,“ Supervisor Jack Seward Jr. said. ”I’ve got all the confidence in the world in Carl A. Nelson … there was a lot of people that thought the budget we picked out wasn’t feasible.“

It’s not entirely clear how big of a role the company would play in the process. Culp proposed different costs for different services, ranging from planning help to design services to construction management.

“It’s our goal to assist the county in moving the project forward and maintaining the goals and maintaining the budget that you have,” Culp said. “Our goal is to have a project, when it goes out to bid, be as good as it can possibly be.”

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