Multi-million-dollar county building projects nearly complete

Timing is everything

When the Gunnison County commissioners toured the new county public works facility and the Public Safety Center last March, vehicle service bays still had dirt floors and the second floor of the detention center was a large empty space. No one knew if the budget would allow for the second floor to be completed during the current phase of construction.

But when commissioners Paula Swenson and Hap Channell joined county staff for a tour of both facilities on Friday, June 24, they found a nearly completed public works building, and the second floor of the safety center had been framed and dry-walled. With anywhere from 40 to 65 workers at each site on any given day, the buildings are being completed quickly and on budget.
County manager Matthew Birnie credits good timing, careful planning and great management by general contractor GE Johnson with keeping the project on track—and allowing for the completion of the second floor of the detention center and a wash bay at the public works facility.
“We bought the construction project at the best time we possibly could. Commodity prices were down when we went out for a bid on the contract. Even if we had been several months later, the cost of project would have gone up. But once we locked in we had a guaranteed maximum price… It was a bad time for [for the economy] but a good time to buy construction projects,” Birnie said.
At the outset of the project, the guaranteed maximum price (GMP) from GE Johnson was $14.2 million. Adding the cost of more services like architects and consultants brought the total budget to $18.4 million. Financing through the 2010 Build America Bond program also made it a good time to build, but Birnie credits careful management of the budget with allowing the county to use contingency funds typically reserved for unforeseen changes to construction for the additional projects.
According to Birnie, the addition of the wash bay to the public works facility was accomplished without raising the GMP. Additional elements, such as a padded cell at the detention center and running fiber optic line from the fairgrounds, did raise the GMP to $14.73 million. The $724,527 completion of the Public Safety Center’s second was paid in part by a federal grant for $404,000. The remainder of that contract as well as the revised GMP is coming out of the county’s overall contingency budget. But Birnie is confident that the final numbers, which he has declined to disclose until the completion of both buildings, will be well within that contingency.  
“Nothing gets cheaper in the future,” Birnie said. “It’s better to do things right, while we can.”
When both buildings are completed, they will change the way the county functions on a day-to-day basis. Some of those changes are simple—like heated parking for county sanding trucks and an indoor wash bay—but will go a long way toward  serving the community and maintaining equipment.
“The advantage of parking equipment inside is the same as the advantage for a car, except that with heavy equipment, if you can’t warm up hydraulics and then push 20-below oil through the systems, it blows out seals and causes hydraulic issues,” public works director Marlene Crosby said.
Sanding trucks can also be loaded at night, preventing the sanding materials from freezing and thawing and jamming the spreader. According to Crosby, the procedural change means sanding trucks can get on the roads 30 minutes earlier in the morning. And the interior wash bay means that equipment can be cleaned during the winter—cracks and other issues can be discovered sooner, and fixed while they’re still small and less expensive.  
The public works building itself will also run more efficiently than the current facility. Eighty percent of the building will be heated by in-floor heat, and six-inch insulation as well as thermal doors will help keep the facility warm—the heat won’t turn on if the garage doors are open. Condensed boilers require lower natural gas consumption, and the furnaces are high efficiency. In addition, used oil from the public works facility will be reused to heat the county’s Crested Butte facility, which already burns used oil from Doyleville, Somerset, Marble and other towns and municipalities.
“Most years we are able to get by using our used oil without much propane except as backup, and it saves us about three months of propane use,” Crosby said.
An extra row of windows in the garage doors and the addition of what are called clear story windows in the extra space created by high ceilings lets extra light into the building.
“I was down at the new shop on a very cloudy day, and the clear story windows were still covered with plastic and it was still brighter in there than it is in our current shop with all the lights burning,” Crosby said.
Both the public works facility and the Public Safety Center—which will house the detention center, the sheriff’s office and the emergency operations center—benefitted from a grant through the Governor’s Energy Office. The High Performance Building Program paid for green building consultants M.E. Group and Ambient Energy to review the buildings for energy efficiency.
“The goal of our participation in the High Performance Building Program was to get a building that was 25 percent more efficient than the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-conditioning Engineers [ASHRAE] standards,” Birnie said.
Both buildings were designed with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) qualifications in mind. But the county opted to apply for the Governor’s program in place of LEED certification. According to Birnie, the cost of certification can often be thousands of dollars, and some of the LEED requirements are not a good fit for jail design.
“A lot of LEED doesn’t have to do with energy efficiency. It has to do with things like the comfort of occupants. Can they adjust the heat or the light?” Birnie said. While some LEED qualifications, like the filtration of natural light into the inmates’ cells, were included in the building’s design, the governor’s program allowed the county to balance energy efficiency with the unique requirements of the American Correctional Association.
The new county jail, officially named the Public Safety Center, will expand jail capacity to 50 beds and enable the county to separate populations: men from women, juveniles from adults, and low-level offenders from high-level offenders. Holding cells for individuals not yet booked into jail will allow officers to hold offenders in a secure location while determining whether or not they need to be fully booked. Programming spaces will make it possible to offer recovery program meetings such as Alcoholics Anonymous or religious services, and inmates will have access to a law library. None of these services have been possible within the constraints of the current jail.
GE Johnson expects to hand the keys over for the public works facility in August, and the Public Safety Center is on track to be finished in December of this year.