Commissioners approve $1.44M contract for wall-shoring ahead of Courthouse Square demo
Work originally was scheduled during construction of new public safety building
The Washington County commissioners approved a $1.44 million bid to perform wall-shoring outside the abandoned Courthouse Square building to move forward with demolition of the former county office tower and make way to construct the new public safety complex.
During the brief special meeting Thursday afternoon, Commissioners Nick Sherman and Electra Janis voted to award the contract to JG Contracting Co. of Carnegie, while Commissioner Larry Maggi dissented after raising concerns about why it was needed at this stage of the project.
“I just have my concerns about it,” Maggi said while asking for the motion to be tabled. “I know it’s an emergency.”
Sherman explained that the need for the wall-shoring now effectively moved that part of the project from the construction phase of the new public safety complex to the demolition portion of the former county offices.
“We were supposed to do (the wall-shoring) after demolition, but now it needs to be done before it,” Sherman said. “We’re changing it from post-demo to pre-demo.”
The commissioners on March 21 approved a $1.555 million bid from Adamo Demolition Co. of Detroit to bring down the building and parking garage that sits behind the Washington County Courthouse, and work began in mid-June to clear the interior before razing it, which is expected to take several months. Once the building is gone, work will begin to prepare the site and build the new 70,000-square-foot public safety complex on the property that will house the 911 emergency dispatch center, a booking center and space for public safety and court filing row offices.
The demolition and construction are being paid for through a $12.5 million bond the commissioners floated in November.
But Maggi pointed to a provision in the original demolition contract that called for temporary shoring during the demo and questioned why this work did not fall under that provision of the agreement. He then asked if this was “new money” for the wall-shoring, to which Sherman responded that it falls under the overall construction bond, but it was originally earmarked for the construction portion of the project.
“We’re changing the scope of the (demolition) so it had to be bid out,” Sherman said. “This is not new money. It’s part of the bond. … This was in the (public safety) building construction budget.”
Sherman then asked Mike Gorman, a senior project manager at Burns Scalo that is managing the demolition and construction, to speak about why the wall-shoring is needed now rather than later. Gorman said that after the engineers had a better look at the Courthouse Square tower and garage, they decided it would be best to perform the wall-shoring work first rather than during construction of the new public safety building.
Gorman added that the eastern wall of the garage gives support to the area around the stairwell that leads to the courthouse, along with the retaining wall that divides the properties, so the shoring work must be done now to allow for safe demolition of the tower. He said the wall-shoring will be permanent in order to stabilize that area for the public safety building.
“We are always going to have a wall there,” Sherman said. “They are stating that for the structural engineering, it would be best to do it this way.”
Sherman said the wall-shoring was built into the overall budget, but the county is moving it from the construction budget over to the demolition side of the project.
“It’s moving from one bucket to another,” Gorman said.