Alamance Community College’s administration is targeting completion of ACC’s $19.9 million Public Safety Training Center in Green Level for early August, following a delay in extending water service to the site.
Installation of a water line to the property in Green Level was originally scheduled to be complete late last year but is now estimated to be complete later this month, after a survey for the existing utilities on Yanceyville Road turned out to be inaccurate, ACC’s trustees were told Monday night.
Once the extension of the water line is complete, the fire suppression and sprinkler systems for the 15,000-square foot administrative/classroom building and indoor firing range will be tested. ACC officials said this week that they hope to receive a temporary occupancy permit for the Green Level site by August 5, which is about three months later than previously anticipated.
An administrative/classroom building and indoor firing range for the Public Safety Training Center occupy approximately 57.5 acres of the 91-acre site in Green Level; 33.5 acres of swampland will be used for search and rescue training exercises, under the terms of a lease with Martin Marietta Materials of Raleigh, which agreed to let ACC use the property for the first three years at no cost and then for $18,917 per year, effective with the fourth year of a 50-year term.
Construction of the facility includes two phases: the administrative/classroom building and indoor firing range near the intersection of N.C. Highway 49 and Sandy Cross Road in Green Level that will house ACC’s Basic Law Enforcement Training and emergency services programs; and a fire training tower at Burlington’s Fire/Police Training Center along Stone Quarry Road in Haw River. Burlington’s city council approved a lease agreement with ACC for a portion of the property along Stone Quarry Road in January 2024.
ACC officials had originally hoped to build the fire training tower at the Green Level site but, in May 2023, recommended moving it to the city of Burlington’s existing Fire/Police Training Center due to insufficient water pressure in Green Level.
Construction of the $19.9 million Public Safety Training Center is being funded by proceeds from the $39 million bond package voters approved for the community college in November 2018.
Meanwhile, ACC’s trustees voted 11-0 Monday night to approve a motion by the board’s building and grounds committee to accept a $734,000 bid from Central Builders of Mebane for the construction of a fire training tower, which is the final phase of construction of ACC’s Public Safety Training Center. (One seat on the trustee board remains vacant following the November 2024 resignation of then-trustee Dr. Charles K. Scott.) The trustees also voted 11-0 this week to rescind a contract previously awarded to a firm in Wilmington that later withdrew.
ACC’s trustees had voted earlier this spring to award the contract for the fire training tower to Wilmington-based Adem Construction, which submitted the lowest bid of $671,000 but asked to withdraw in late April. Central Builders submitted the second-lowest of three bids for the fire training tower. The total budget for site work and completion of the fire training tower is $850,000, according to ACC’s administration.
Remote voting questioned
A week after their regularly-scheduled monthly meeting on May 13, ACC’s trustees convened a special meeting on May 21, for which two trustees were physically present, while five trustees participated and voted remotely, via the Zoom online teleconferencing platform, based on a breakdown of attendance and voting that ACC officials provided to the newspaper.
The trustees voted 7-0 to rescind the contract with Adem Construction and 7-0 to approve a recommendation to award the contract to Central Builders on May 21.
Alamance News publisher Tom Boney, Jr., however, questioned whether a meeting without an actual quorum of members present constituted an official meeting where business could be acted on and votes taken.
The North Carolina Court of Appeals concluded in an August 2024 decision, State of North Carolina v. Anson County, that a vote by Anson County’s commissioners in December 2022 to appoint a successor to the incumbent sheriff, who died prior to winning another term that year, had been legally invalid. The Appeals Court determined that Anson County’s commissioners had improperly convened an emergency meeting, failed to give the required 48-hours’ notice of the meeting, and lacked a quorum needed to conduct business, according to the case background.
The N.C. Supreme Court declined to grant a discretionary review of the appellate decision earlier this year. “We leave the decision undisturbed but without precedential value order,” Supreme Court justice Allison Riggs wrote in her order.
ACC president Dr. Ken Ingle subsequently assured the newspaper that the recommendations to rescind the contract with Adem Construction and to award the contract to Central Builders would be placed on the agenda for the trustees’ June 9 meeting.
“I don’t anticipate it negatively impacting the completion because there’s such a long lead time on [the building materials],” Ingle told the newspaper earlier this month. The fire training tower will be constructed of “Conex boxes,” which are cargo containers that will likely be sourced from one of two suppliers based in the U.S., he explained.
During a brief discussion Monday night, ACC trustee Bill Gomory, who serves as chairman for the board’s building and grounds committee, told his fellow trustees that the lead time time for production and delivery of the Conex boxes means the timeframe for completing the fire training tower has been pushed to next spring.
Students in ACC’s firefighter program will continue to use Burlington’s Fire/Police Training Center for training exercises, though the forthcoming expansion of the facility will provide additional capacity and enhance the types of training that ACC is able to offer in future academic years, Ingle told the newspaper Monday night.
The trustees’ latest vote to accept the bid from Central Builders requires final approval by the State Construction Office, which is responsible for administering and overseeing community college building contracts totaling $500,000 or more.
Fiscal hiccups
Since its conception prior to passage of the $39.6 million bond package in 2018, the overall budget for the Public Safety Training Center has swelled several times, from the original price tag of $10.4 million, due to what ACC officials have attributed to inflation costs for building materials and labor during and since the Covid-19 pandemic.
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A special $5.5 million appropriation in the state biennial budget that the General Assembly passed in 2023 is funding the construction of a 14,000-square foot indoor firing range with 12 individual lanes for target practice at the Green Level site. Construction of the firing range is now scheduled for completion in late June, ACC officials said earlier this month.
Alamance County’s commissioners also allocated an additional $2.5 million for the Public Safety Training Center in early 2022 to cover cost overruns for the project.
Along with the bond proceeds, additional county funding, and state funding secured in 2023, ACC also received $500,000 in federal stimulus funding through the American Rescue Plan to extend water lines to the Green Level site.
Samet, which was hired as the construction manager-at risk to ensure that ACC’s Public Safety Training Center is completed on time and within the overall budget, is waiting for revised permit approvals from the state Department of Environmental Quality and Department of Transportation, to install an additional water line extension.
The final contract for the fire training tower will be presented at the trustees’ next meeting in August, ACC officials said Monday night; the trustees customarily don’t meet during the month of July.
In other business, the trustees learned Monday night that Ingle’s employment contract as ACC president has been extended for an additional three years, through June 30, 2028, following a vote by the State Board of Community Colleges in mid-May, based on a letter the trustees received from N.C. Community College System president Dr. Jeff Cox.
