Commissioners want to hold line on jail cost

A late afternoon McLeod County Board workshop Sept. 29 was brief, but provided a wealth of information regarding the proposed jail expansion.
After hashing out ways to structure the project’s proposal to attract better bids, consultants from Wold Architecture and Contegrity Group asked commissioners to give them a bottom-line figure.
The three commissioners at the workshop — Ron Shimanski, Sheldon Nies and Joe Nagel — felt that the county needs to stick with its original budgeted cost of about $7.4 million.
Shimanski pointed out that the project had been presented to the county’s taxpayers at that figure, and Nies noted that there were no plans to bond for it. Plans are to use the Annamarie Tudhope bequest and existing capital funds to complete the project, without bonding and without raising property taxes.
Commissioners tasked the consultants with coming up with ways to get the project back in line with that figure. As you may remember, when bids came in on the original proposal, the lowest was nearly $2 million above the estimate.
And it is pleasing to see that Wold and Contegrity Group are willing — even eager — to rise to the challenge. Representatives at the meeting offered several options to bring down the cost, among which were timing the bidding for a time when contractors are looking for work, to bidding a base project with alternates, to looking at scaling back on square footage and reconfiguring the sallyport (the garage area where squads drop off and pick up prisoners).
In the interest of keeping the project moving along, the County Board tentatively set another workshop for Oct. 27 at 9:30 a.m. to meet again with its consultants.
We look forward to watching the plans evolve so that McLeod County can both stay within its target budget and achieve a jail system that will meet its needs far into the future.