City councilmen may have more money to work with than originally planned to pave streets and fix major drainage issues across Columbus.
Bids for the street improvement portion of a $4.5 million Columbus capital improvements project were opened Thursday, and the apparent low bidder, Falcon Contracting, was nearly 10 percent under the initial $3.19 million estimate.
Falcon Contracting’s bid to pave portions of 61 city streets was $2.87 million. APAC, the other bidder for the project, was also well under the estimate, but its bid was more than $100,000 over Falcon Contracting’s bid.
Councilmen will take up the bids Tuesday. If they approve Falcon’s, the company could begin work before the end of the month.
In June, councilmen approved a $5 million bond issue to finance the work, including $500,000 in engineering, project managing and legal fees. A 15-year payment plan will begin next month to finance the bond. A 1.1-mill property tax increase, also approved by councilmen in June, will be used to make payments.
The list of streets that will be improved has been finalized by city project managing firm J5 Broaddus and engineering firm Neel-Schaffer after correspondence with councilmen over several months this year. Kevin Stafford of Neel-Schaffer said based on the bid, councilmen may be able to add paving, drainage or sidewalk projects that were on their wish list but deleted due to money constraints. An original infrastructure survey compiled by J5 earlier this year came out to an estimated $6.3 million but was whittled down to fit within the $4.5 million budget.
The second round of projects to be bid out will still consist mainly of drainage and sidewalk projects selected by councilmen. However, with about $319,000 left over, a few more paving projects that were deleted to make the final paving list may be bid out as well depending on what councilmen want to do with the little extra money they have.
“There are a couple of councilmen who ran out of money before they ran out of streets, but they said, ‘These couple of drainage issues are important to me and I want to take care of them,'” Stafford said. “We talked about what that would cost and set aside that money for them. Now that they’re under, they may be just enough under to add those couple of others that weren’t as high priority as the drainage. You could definitely see some more streets added. There were a couple of councilmen who didn’t have any drainage needs to speak of that were monetarily major. We’re going back to them and ask where else they want to spend the money.”
Project funding has been split evenly among the city’s six wards, providing each councilman about $750,000 to prioritize the most critical needs and address them with the money.
Nathan Gregory covers city and county government for The Dispatch.
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