A cost adjustment might seem all but inevitable with a project on the scale of the county’s proposed expansion of the Judge J.B. Allen Jr. Court House in Graham.
But a “change order” just five months into this $37 million venture proved a hard sell with some of Alamance County’s commissioners, who were confronted with this very prospect earlier this week.
The board of commissioners ultimately voted 4-to-1 to approve this $336,000 increase in the county’s contract with CRA Associates, which has been tasked with the design work on this three-story addition and overhaul of the 30-year-old court building.
Yet, it wasn’t without some difficulty that the board’s majority accepted this change in the contract, which they had originally approved in December at an estimated price point of $3,148,000.
The proposed change in CRA’s fees had initially appeared on a so-called consent agenda of putatively routine or noncontroversial items that the commissioners adopted en bloc when they convened their latest meeting on Monday.
The board eventually bumped the change order from the consent agenda after commissioner Pam Thompson began to question the budgetary impact of the proposal. In response to these inquiries, assistant county manager Brian Baker explained that this particular change order isn’t so much a cost overrun as a revision to the original terms of CRA’s contract.
Baker went on to recall that he had originally passed up an offer from CRA to include various audiovisual features within the scope of the contract as well as assistance with planning review for the project.
“But it was just too complicated for us to do inhouse,” the assistant county manager went on to concede. “They convinced us we needed them to do this…So, this is adding those services onto the contract in an amendment.”
Baker went on to assure the commissioners that the funds to cover this additional design work can be readily shifted from the project’s construction budget without raising the $37 million ceiling for the courthouse expansion. This vouchsafe was enough to win over all the commissioners save Thompson, who has consistently voted against any item pertaining to this project.
The board went on to approve the change order by a margin of 4-to-1.
