City Purchaser Tammy Tefft
WESTFIELD – The Council on Aging Building Committee pulled a number of items out of the base contract which will be advertised shortly for construction of a new senior center.
The items pulled out of the base contract were ranked for priority and will be listed as add-on alternatives to the base contract. That approach was taken because of the uncertain climate for major construction bids.
If the bids come in lower than projected, the add-on alternatives will come into play, starting with the highest ranked options, with alternatives added until the construction costs hit the level of bonding approved by the city council.
The committee discussed two approaches to reducing the cost of the senior center construction, now estimated at $322 per square foot. One approach is to build a base contract with lower cost materials, then list a more expensive material as an alternative, such as bidding for vinyl fencing, then listing wrought iron as an alternative.
The other approach is to list items or work that can be done later as alternatives. An example of that was the emergency generator package, which has an estimated cost of $100,000. The generator was given the lowest alternative ranking among other options, such as wiring the building to accept power from a large portable generator. The Water Resource Department has several towed generators for emergency power.
The committee also discussed inclusion of proprietary items in the bid contract.
“I do shy away from proprietary items because the vendors know that they have us over a barrel and tend to giver higher prices than generic items would cost,” City Purchaser Tammy Tefft said.
Tefft said the there are several exceptions to that approach. One exception is energy-efficiency systems which have to be compatible with the systems now in other school and municipal buildings.
Another exception is the furnace system where Mestek would be the proprietary vendor because “they have always been very competitive in recent Westfield projects,” Tefft said.
Both of those exceptions have to do with maintenance of the facilities.
Another option to reduce the cost of construction is to have Westfield Vocational Technical High School students involved in the project, specifically in running electrical and technology cables through conduits installed by the general contractor. Another area would be landscaping using students from that program at WVTHS to do much of the labor, with the exception of planting large caliber trees and doing the final loaming and seeding, which would be done by the general contractor.
Mayor Daniel M. Knapik has established a cost of $7 million to construct the new 20,000-square-foot, two-story facility. The estimate for the construction is now at $7.26 million, which could climb to $7.9 million with the inclusion of construction contingencies, estimated at 8 percent of the construction cost.
