Boone County to reject bids, revise animal-control facility plans - News - Rockford Register Star - Rockford, IL

By Ben Stanley
Rockford Register Star

Posted Jul. 7, 2015 at 9:16 PM

BELVIDERE — Boone County finally has money to replace its antiquated animal-control center, which for years has relied on patch repairs to address a litany of sanitation and infestation problems, but construction will be delayed months as a county committee searches for ways to shave costs.

Two weeks ago, the Boone County Roads and Capital Improvements Committee received bids from three local contractors for the project. Each bid exceeded the county's $800,000 budget — funded entirely through a small property tax increase voters approved in November — by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The bids came as a surprise to committee members, who were given a cost estimate of roughly $800,000 by architect Mark Schmidt in July 2014. Schmidt's estimate influenced the county board's decision to seek that amount in the tax-hike referendum, but several changes were made to building plans before bids were opened in June.

At a special meeting on June 22, the committee voted to recommend the county board accept the low bid from Larson & Larson Builders on the condition that the design could be tweaked to keep costs within budget. However, the committee voted unanimously tonight  to reverse its recommendation after Boone County State's Attorney Michelle Courier warned the county board that making nearly $300,000 in alterations to the building's design after the bid has been accepted could undermine a state statute that regulates the competitive bidding process for county projects.

"The architect has indicated that in order to reduce the cost, he will need to redraw his plans, the same plans on which the project was bid upon," Courier wrote in a letter to the board. "This is a material change from the original project. ... giving the current lowest responsible bidder an unfair advantage."

The county board is expected to reject all three bids at a meeting on July 15. Now the committee must go back to the drawing board and work with Schmidt to draft a much simpler and cheaper design, then re-open bids to local contractors.

"You get so much money to work with, you want to get the best building you can," Schmidt said. "Every time you go to one committee, one group wants one feature, another group wants other bells and whistles and pretty soon it gets bigger ... and then you've got to start shrinking it again. The main goal is, what can we do to get the building built?"

Schmidt estimated late August is the earliest that revised building plans could be released to bidders.

Page 2 of 2 - "I know it's going to get done," Boone County Animal Services Operations Supervisor Roger Tresemer said after the meeting. "It's just, I don't want it ... to get to the point where the integrity of the building is not much different than what we have now." 

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