By ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
As projects continue to be improved at county facilities, updates continue to be made as well by Seward County Contract Consultant Neal Coffey for county commissioners to get an idea of progress on those projects.
At the commission’s Dec. 16 meeting, commissioners approved a change order and a contract addendum for work being done on the Seward County Courthouse.
With the change order, Coffey said he initially sent the item to Melinda Baker, executive assistant to Administrator April Warden, but at that time, numbers were still in the process of developing and changing.
“We have had some change orders that have popped up, and rather than doing an individual small change order for each of these, we’ve compiled on this change order four elements,” he said.
Those elements included the main entrance area of the courthouse disbanding from its original surface, five exterior doors rubbing on carpet, an unplanned gap after the removal of entry doors and a rusted conduit providing power to the lights that illuminated the front wall. Coffey said the amount of the change order was $21,465, which, after commissioners approved the change order, brought the project’s total cost to $903,918.53.
Funding for the change order has been established in money the county received from the federal American Rescue Plan Act.
With the addendum, Coffey said pursuant to the commission’s request for the contract remodel, staff wanted to make sure funding had been set aside through the ARPA funding, and County Counsel Nathan Foreman helped develop a contract addendum to affix a not-to-exceed value at the end of the contract of $1.16 million.
“If you approve this addendum, that will not change the change order process,” Coffey said. “The contractor will not get carte blanche to just go and spend the money. The change order process will from the general contactor to your architect, GMCN (Architects), to make certain their change order is something that was outside of the original scope. If the architect approves the change order, it’ll come back to me, and at that time, I will present the change order to you as a body for approval. That way, you continue to control the spending on the courthouse remodel.”
As of Dec. 16, Coffey said 80 percent of the interior work on the courthouse had been completed, and he estimated about 60 to 70 percent of the exterior work was done.
As with many county facilities, solutions are being sought to drainage problems at the courthouse, and Coffey said a contemplated solution has been found there.
“We walked down the project, and it looks like we can add some dirt to the west side of that building and roll that water to the middle from the building and from the sidewalk and roll it all south,” he said. “In order to do that, we’ll be stacking some dirt up on the building. We will have to make certain we waterproof that brick we put that dirt on.”
Commissioner Presephoni Fuller asked Coffey how many more change orders would be needed on the courthouse project. Coffey began by explaining the project’s discovery phase has been completed.
“The civil work for the landscaping up front is one,” he said. “There will be one for the dirt, for the grass and any shrubbery you want to put in. That may all be compiled into this one. In this project, we did put accommodations in and under the sidewalks to pass sprinkler systems through, but there will be some sprinkler system repair because of the lines that had to be removed during the extension of the parking lot, sidewalks.”
Under the project’s current scope, Coffey said there is a four-foot strip of existing dirt between the sidewalk and building on the courthouse’s east side.
“At some point in time, some flowers and things were planted in there, but now it looks like it’s just been sterilized, and it’s just a strip of dirt,” he said. “The thinking as we were walking through is to ask the contractor to provide us with a change order to 100 percent concrete that out. There’s some drainage pipes from the roof that come underneath there. We’ll have to make sure we secure those. There’s also some sewer clean outs in there. We’ll have to make certain we secure those.”
Coffey said benches on the courthouse property were in horrible shape and removed as part of the project.
“The contemplation was to go to the landfill and buy some of the nice heavy benches they have,” he said. “That would be two benches up front, and the one over by the southeast back door is in horrible shape as well. Do we pull it out and replace it? I would recommend we do that.”
Coffey said most of the major parts of the project are now out of the way.
“We did get the concrete torn out of the Sally port area, which was a major step,” he said. “That’s 50 percent replaced. The city did come in and lower their water meters and lower their water valve boxes. Now we can straighten all that out and not have any big humps in there, so a lot of that risk has gone away. Most of the exterior painting has been primed first coat. We’ve got this end of the building we have to get into, which is in that far yard of the sheriff’s yard. That’s going to have some security concerns associated with that. We worked that out with the sheriff, but I don’t see any change orders necessary in there.”
The change order and contract addendum were both approved with unanimous votes.
