County seeks cost reductions for facility improvements

WASHINGTON — “I think we’d better back up and regroup, fellas.”

Those were the words Washington County Supervisor Stan Stoops used to address the gap between Washington County’s roughly $6 million facility improvement cost projections and its available $4.1 million of American Rescue Plan Act funds, during a tense work session Tuesday morning.

County officials said they had plans to trim down the effective cost of the projects, which include renovations at Orchard Hill to accommodate several department offices, redesigns inside the Courthouse to expand the attorney’s office work space, and a relocation of the County Engineer to the same building as most of that department’s employees.

For one, Washington County Engineer Jacob Thorius said his office had saved up around $600,000 to offset the roughly projected $1.2 million cost of his relocation, a move the would also entail the conversion of his current office at the McCreedy building into a storage area. The County Attorney’s Office has set aside $51,920 from its own budget to help with the roughly $594,500 price tag for work on its floor of the courthouse, according to an email from County Attorney Nathan Repp.

Further plan development may also lower the expected price tags, according to those familiar with the project.

“I think those numbers are high right now, just because we haven’t dug into everything to understand exactly what we’re dealing with,” said Luke Leyden, the head of consultant company Encite Architecture & Design. “That would be the logical next step, to kind of refine that to get a better handle on that number.”

Such specifics have already lowered the cost estimates at Orchard Hill, where Carl A. Nelson & Co. Project Manager Ryan Harris said the projection was down to $3.385 million for the proposed renovations. A week ago, the expected high end for that work was $3.445 million.

All told, it’s still unclear whether the changing math and department-specific boosts will be enough to fall within the county’s desired budget. Two supervisors at the meeting said they hoped to bring the total down to $3.5 million or lower. Most have previously signaled plans to spend no more than the amount available from remaining ARPA money — about $4.1 million, according to County Treasurer Jeff Garrett.

Supervisors acknowledged the possibility that they’d have to trim down the project’s scope to make ends meet.

“This, right now, is very pie-in-the-sky,” said Supervisor Marcus Fedler, who has acted as the board’s liaison with construction companies involved in the project. “This is what would be awesome. Whether awesome becomes something less than awesome, I don’t know. We’re going to have to figure that out.”

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Tuesday’s work session featured little discussion about what, specifically, could be trimmed from the plans.

Garrett suggested dropping plans for the courthouse’s first floor, where some department heads said they saw little need for change. That would take $558,000-$631,000 off the bill, based on consultant projections that assumed the first floor and basement would entail similar construction work.

Fedler said the county could consider a lower budget version for the new engineer’s office, where current plans include about 5,500 square feet of space, some of which would serve as temperature-controlled storage under current plans.

“We haven’t really laid a whole lot out, out there,” Fedler said. “It could be that we scale that back completely, into just an office space.”

Otherwise, possible cutbacks are anyone’s guess as the county awaits more specific project plans, and by extension, more specific cost estimates. Board Chair Bob Yoder said he planned to put the topic on the agenda of next week’s regular meeting for further discussion.

The discussion Tuesday morning was punctuated with heated back-and-forths about county priorities, supervisors’ ability to keep one another in the loop, and whether one question from Yoder violated the county’s posted agenda for a “work session,” a type of meeting most governments declare when they plan not to take any action, but which is not defined in state code.

It’s not the first time county facility plans have proved a point of controversy in Washington.

An early list of 23 priorities for the county’s ARPA money was criticized for repeating some options multiple times, or splitting others into several pieces that would more easily work as one project.

Eventual plans to use the funds for a move of most county staff to Orchard Hill met resistance from local businesses, who said doing so would inconvenience Washington citizens and drive business traffic away from downtown. While an eventual compromise deal was reached that left most courthouse personnel in town, it came after countless arguments between members of the public and elected officials.

Fedler said the information discussed at Tuesday’s meeting represented a step forward in what is now yearslong deliberation.

“As far as the $3.5 million, I don’t know how we’re going to get to there,” he said. “But we’ll do our best to make it happen. We’ll figure out how that’s going to look. And my hope is, we can continue to have dialogue that we’ve had over the course of this process, and come to some synergy.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com