POTTSTOWN >> The new $4 million public works facility may have ended up costing more than $300,000 more than budget, or almost less than budget, depending on whom you ask and how they calculate it.
Martin Kimmel, a principal in the Conshohocken firm of Kimmel Bogrette Architecture + Site Inc., was before borough council Monday night to give a final accounting of the new public works project.
In response to a question from Councilman Dennis Arms, he said the total final cost of the project, located along the border with West Pottsgrove, was $4,387,743.72.
That’s $317,743.72 above the contract price of $4,070,000.
Most of that cost overrun was due to the necessity of removing unstable soils from the site and replacing them with more stable soils, Kimmel said.
“There was a lot of fill, a lot of mucky, unsuitable fill that had been filled on the site over decades, and decades and decades” he Kimmel said.
Kimmel told council Vice President Sheryl Miller that the cost overrun was $313,000 and that “almost 100 percent of that was soils” – a number he pegged at $270,000, plus another $55,000 for “enhancements.”
He said that total would put the project at about 4 percent over its contracted price.
“That would be not bad in it’s own right,” he said.
If the cost of removing the dirt and replacing new dirt were to be subtracted, the cost overrun would be 1.7 percent, said Kimmel.
And if the extra “enhancements” the borough asked for were further removed, the project would actually have come in at $7,800 less than budget, he said.
It could have been worse, said Kimmel.
If the change orders the contractor had sought for the soil issues had not been challenged, the cost overrun would have been closer “to half a million dollars,” said Kimmel.
But that was cut “about in half” by some sharpened pencils, he said.
“We saved just under $300,000 in battling the details” with the contractor he said.
“So I think that’s about as good as we could have done, absent having good dirt, which, I think would be kind of a victory lap for everybody,”Kimmel said. “You’ve done about as well as I’ve ever heard.”
“That’s great,” said borough council President Dan Weand, who then asked Councilman Joe Kirkland, who is an architect, for his opinion.
“I’m highly impressed with the change-order number,” Kirkland said.
Kimmel told Miller that while the project did go over the contracted price, it was “well beneath the contingency that you had held for that. If you take your budget plus your contingency, it did not go over, but it was higher than the actual contract amount.”
During his presentation, Kimmel held a sheaf of papers from which those numbers were drawn, and he told the council members as he waved in front of them, “but you have all this.”
But as it turns out they didn’t.
When Flanders was asked for the information Kimmel was holding, he replied via email that “I heard that too but there was nothing distributed …………….. they (council) had nothing to refer to.”
At his suggestion, Digital First Media filed a Right-to-Know request for the “Public Works Facility Final Change Order Log” and was supplied with a document dated July 27 that contained a spreadsheet of numbers, very few of which matched those provided by Kimmel Monday night.
It did indicate, however, that the borough did shave more than $66,000 off the cost of the project through something called “value-added engineering,” which Flanders explained to council last year is an effort to see if money can be saved by replacing some systems specified in the bid with others.
