The Escambia County Board of County Commissioners has scheduled a special meeting to discuss the new jail the county is planning to build.
County staff and representatives from DLR Group Inc. will give a presentation to commissioners and the public addressing the status of the project. Commissioners have selected DLR Group Inc. as the county’s design criteria professional for the new correctional facility. The firm has been slated to develop the design criteria package for a design-build of the new facility.
At last week’s BCC meeting, Commissioner Lumon May questioned how far the the design-build documents should go. He was concerned that if they went to more than 5- or 10-percent it would hamper the creativity of the contractor and add unnecessary extra cost to the $125-million project.
“I believe that there’s a difference between design-building and the design-build been doing right. The Design Institute of America says you should only take it to 5-percent or 10-percent, and hand those documents over to allow for more creativity,” said May, “So, if you design the lighting of HVAC to 30-percent and we hand it off to a contractor, he’s not going to accept that 30-percent, we’re going to pay for that twice.”
He added, “What I’m saying, it’ll cost us about $8 million on $125 million project to just put out construction documents and hard bid it. If we pay $4 million plus $8 million, that’s $12 million. Wouldn’t it be a cost savings, in your opinion, to just hard-bid it out? I’m trying to figure out what is benefit of a design-build, of taking a bridging document to 30-percent?”
According to Commissioner May, one of the reasons the construction cost of the Maritime Park stadium were so high was because the City allowed for the bridging documents to go too far. “At 30-percent, you’re too deep in. You’re double paying. Don’t you think it would be a cost savings if we only got it to 10-percent?”
Commissioner Doug Underhill agreed with May. “Unfortunately, when you go beyond the 10-percent you start to cut into the agility that comes with the DB concept. 10-percent is prescriptive, 30-percent is directive. The more that you direct, then the more of those areas where a DB firm would be able to find ways to be more competitive. You basically direct that agility out of the process.”
Steve Jernigan with Bay Design Associates, and DLR’s local representative, said, “Commissioner May, you bring up some good points. In fact, Joe Hanes, who’s the project principal with DLR, is the former national president of Design-Build Association of America.”
He said, “Joe is very much an advocate for the DBIA process. In our contract anywhere, it never says you’ll take it to 30-percent design. In a design-build there are certain things that are mostly, as you described, prescriptive. There are some because of programmatic requirements and the desire for the classifications of inmates, for example. We have to have a certain level of design because it’s whether how many inmates are in single cells, dual cells, 8-person cells, how many are juvenile cells, how many have to do with infirmary, those kind of things. If you just take it, 10-percent, 20-percent, whatever … The typical definition of schematics design might be 15-percent, something like that.”
Commissioner May said the board had been told in prior meetings that the Design-Build documents would take the plans to 30-percent, which was why he sought clarification.
County staff and DLR plan to update the BCC on the project and the land purchase at the special meeting scheduled for Oct. 19, at 9 a.m. in the Ernie Lee Magaha Government Building, in downtown Pensacola.
