10.01 - Consider Bids for Government Drive Project

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� MEMORANDUM TO: Mayor and City Council FROM: Tim Houle, City Engineer DATE: Apri13, 2012 SUBJECT: Government Drive Rehabilitation Project Attached is a recommendation letter on the two bids the City received for this project. The action requested of the City Council is to Award the project to Tri-City Paving of Little Falls, the lowest responsible bidder, on the basis of the unit prices in their bid proposal. After this, we will work with Tri-City Paving and City staff to obtain bonds and insurance certificates from Tri-City Paving and put together three Contract Documents (one for the City, one for Tri-City Paving, and one for WSN) for the \.. Mayor and Clerk to sign on behalf of the City. There will also be coordination with the DNR as well as with the upcoming summer County project on CSAH 11 / Main Street. WSN recommends the City keep a healthy contingency amount for this project to cover unanticipated costs. One that I have mentioned to the Council before is that after we mill, the thickness or condition of the pavement below this level may be such that we have to remove it and put in aggregate base. That is one reason we bid these projects with unit prices. If we did run into such a situation, or other possibilities, we have unit prices already set and we just increase (or decrease) quantities to account for the actual work needed in the field. Punching in some very rough numbers on the above scenario, we could easily get to $50,000. We realize that the earlier study that looked at a complete reconstruction with streetscape components had an estimated project cost of about $1.5 million. The Council did not want to pursue this and we provided an estimate for a mill and inlay project of a little over $300,000. These bids obviously came in less than even that amount. There are different reasons for these cost differences, but one reason is that Tri-City Paving's bituminous mixture unit price was less than we anticipated ($50/ton vs $60/ton). Another reason is that we went with seeding instead of sod (which, depending on how one deals with different quantities, � could amount to about a$20,000 cost difference / decrease).