Southeastern Community College is going back to the drawing board when it comes to the construction of its new health services building on the West Burlington campus.
That's the result of the college's Board of Trustees choosing to reject all of the construction bids received prior to Tuesday night's special meeting. SCC President Michael Ash said, unfortunately, there were not many bids to consider.
"Basically, we got one bid for a general contractor and we had about five packages out there," said Ash. "All told, we got 8-9 bids and only a couple of (the packages) had multiple bids. Each of those bids was well over what we expected them to be so it was just not a robust bid process."
Dr. Ash said he was hopeful that the project would garner enough interest from local contractors to result in bids below the original estimate of $8-million. Instead, most of the local contractors did not submit bids, and the ones that did put the cost around $10-million.
Ash said part of that is due to how busy local contractors are at the present time.
"The contractors that we were hopeful would bid are pretty full for their schedule right now, so they were just not available," said Ash.
Ash said another factor was the timeline sought by the college. He said the goal was for construction to get underway this year, which he said runs counter to the fact that contractors tend to be finishing up projects at this time of year.
Ash said the plan is to put the project back out for bid in mid-November with contractors having until late-December to submit a bid. He said construction would not begin until the spring.
"We will also be making contact with area contractors to encourage them to consider bidding and just monitoring that a little closer," said Ash.
Ash said the college is also looking internally to reduce the overall cost by scaling back portions of the project and clarifying some of the bid documents.
He said SCC is not letting this stop the momentum created by the proposed building, so a groundbreaking originally scheduled for Oct. 20 on the West Burlington campus will proceed as planned.
