The passage of a new annual budget wasn’t the only item of business that came before Alamance County’s commissioners when they convened its latest regularly scheduled meeting on Monday (June 16).
The board of commissioners also used this 4-hour confab to sign off on two multimillion-dollar contracts that promise to move forward two ventures that have been several years in the offing.
Courthouse work
One of these two agreements formally names the Samet Corporation of Greensboro as the general contractor for a $37 million expansion of the Judge J.B. Allen, Jr. Court House, which is located along the 200 block of West Elm Street in Graham.
This deal, which the commissioners approved in a 4-to-1 vote, puts no precise dollar figure on Samet’s contribution to this project. It, instead, designates the firm as a “construction manager at risk,” which obligates Samet to complete this project within the stipulated budget or eat any excess costs that it may incur.
The absence of an exact fee from this contract raised the eyebrows of commissioner Ed Priola, who has repeatedly pressed county staff members to explain just how the county arrived at the $37 million price tag for the courthouse expansion.
Priola, who joined the commissioners in December after the project’s eight-figure estimate had been floating around for some time, reminded his colleagues on Monday that he still hasn’t received a full breakdown for this sum.
Brian Baker, one of the county’s assistant managers, conceded that $37 million isn’t a fine-tuned calculation so much as a ballpark estimate, which the project’s architect had derived from consultations with the county’s administrators after a previous set of commissioners balked at a $99 million figure that drew on feedback from law enforcement and court system officials.
Baker insisted that Samet, which was selected over three other contenders for the construction manager’s role will be able to bring more specificity to this project’s finances thanks to its wealth of institutional knowledge.
“Samet is very experienced at the local level and, more importantly, they’re very experienced with courthouses,” the assistant county manager went on to assert.
Priola ultimately joined the 4-to-1 vote to approve the contract – whose lone holdout was commissioner Pam Thompson, who has consistently dissented from any item related to the courthouse expansion.
Dispatch upgrade gets a 10-4
The board of commissioners also gave its imprimatur to a seven-figure contract with a company called Hexagon that county staff members and their counterparts in Burlington had chosen to put in a new computerized emergency dispatching system that will serve both the city and county.
Bruce Walker, another one of the county’s assistant managers, recalled that the foundations for this unified dispatching system were laid in 2019 when the city and county were poised to set up a new 9-1-1 center to house their now-separate emergency call centers. Burlington has since pulled out of this venture due to a dispute with the county over the division of this project’s costs. Walker added, however, that the city and county have remained on the same frequency when it comes to the replacement of their disparate communication systems with a single, interchangeable platform.
“This is a first step where we’re working together,” the assistant county manager added. “Sharing the cost of one system rather than two systems saves both the county and the city significant expenses, and it results in a more efficient and safer system for our citizens.”
Walker acknowledged that this project “really gained steam” when Burlington obtained a federal grant for $963,000 million to offset the $6 million-plus cost for this system.
Since the city and county have agreed on a method to divvy up the project’s remaining costs based on the emergency call volumes for the past three years in these two jurisdictions. This formula assigns the county 61 percent of the bill – or $3.4 million – while Burlington would pick up the remaining 39 percent – which amounts to about $2.2 million.
Although none of the commissioners had any strenuous objections to this joint effort with Burlington, commissioner Ed Priola protested the eleventh-hour submission of the proposed contract with Hexagon to the county’s governing board.
“The contract comes to us late in the day. Literally at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon,” the commissioner said, “and it’s a $3 million commitment…so, I’m very against the late introduction of such an amendment.”
Alamance County’s attorney Rik Stevens accepted the culpability for the contract’s belated submission, although he assured the commissioners that there has been no shortage of due diligence on the part of either the city or county.
“It was my effort to make sure our efforts are protected,” he added. “I wanted to send the contract to you in a form that I could support.”
Meanwhile, Alamance County’s manager Heidi York confessed that there was some urgency in the contract’s addition to Monday night’s meeting agenda since Hexagon has promised to discount the new system by $200,000 if the agreement is approved before June 30.
“To me that’s big money,” the board’s chairman John Paisley, Jr. declared before the contract passed in a 5-to-0 decision.
