Spencerport firehouse bids bring sticker shock

Spencerport firehouse bids bring sticker shock

Devastated - that was the feeling Tom Friedo, chairman of the Spencerport Fire District Board of Commissioners, said he felt when the board started opening bids for the reconstruction of Spencerport Fire District's Station 1 on July 19. "I opened the bids and could tell almost at a glance that they were higher than we anticipated," he said.

The bids were higher to the tune of $1 million more than the anticipated $5.2 million it was thought it would take to rebuild the station that was destroyed by fire close to one year ago. Projected construction costs were $190 per square foot; the bids came in at $228 per square foot.

Even before Station 1 burned, fire commissioners had been looking at plans for a new firehouse - the fire hastened those plans. Taxpayers in the Village of Spencerport approved a referendum put forth by the district to replace the building with a 31,000 square foot, two story firehouse with a partially finished basement. The plans for the firehouse include a public meeting area, shower, bunk rooms and locker facilities for men and women, a kitchen and, most importantly, room for the department's trucks. The new structure will be large enough to house two pumper trucks, a ladder truck, one rescue vehicle, a utility van and still have enough room to maneuver around. The former building was 9,500 square feet.

"We're going to have to look at strategies that will probably involve drastic cuts," Friedo said. "But, we are obligated to the community, to the taxpayers, to offer them a project as close to the one as the one they approved when they voted."

Where the commissioners will scale back is still not known. Friedo said the group will be holding meetings weekly to determine where, and what, to scale back on. "We needed the room we projected in the original firehouse plans," he said. "But we are going to have to look at new options - smaller meeting rooms, doubling up officers in offices, different materials in some of the construction. We would like to keep the footprint the same, but we are going to have to look at everything and take it all into consideration."

Andrew Petrosky, business segment leader of Bergman Associates, the project architect, said there were a "bunch of little things" that led to the unexpected increase in prices. "We started looking into prices for the project back in November 2006 and we went back and talked to the construction manager (Watchdog Building Partners) three times and there was never any deviation from the original estimate," he said. "Since November, and even since March, there has been substantial increases in concrete prices, the price of copper and steel. We didn't expect them to be that much."

When contacted, Jack Osborn of Watchdog had no comment on the Spencerport project.

It will be back to the drawing board for Petrosky, the construction manager and the fire commissioners as they decide where to make cuts in the construction while still providing the services to the taxpayers that they have come to expect while serving the functionality the firefighters are seeking.

"We will be looking to see what can be eliminated or reduced without eliminating the necessary function of the building," Petrosky said.

Because the project will have to be re-bid and because there is likely to be an increased cost in what the fire department needs to construct the new firehouse building, the project will go before the taxpayers again for their approval.

Construction, which was to have begun July 24, has been pushed back to 2008, likely April at the earliest and pending voter approval.