The soon-to-be constructed facility for a farmers market in Glasgow is depicted with technical markings in this photo of a portion of a blueprint page. This front end is to face West Main Street. Melinda J. Overstreet / for Glasgow News 1
By MELINDA J. OVERSTREET
for Glasgow News 1
Six companies submitted bids for the honor of constructing a 3,600-square-foot farmers market facility in Glasgow – a place the Bounty of the Barrens can call home regardless of the season or whether other events are taking place on the Glasgow Public Square.
One of those bids was considerably lower than all the rest, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that company will be awarded the contract, said Jim McGowan, city engineer and superintendent of the Glasgow Department of Public Works, to all those present for the bid opening. He and other city officials, along with Precision Engineering of Tompkinsville, the firm that has developed the plans for the project and the bid specifications, will carefully examine all the bid packages that were officially opened Tuesday afternoon at Glasgow City Hall to ensure nothing was missing and that the company has addressed all the necessary requirements specified before a decision is made.
McGowan said they expect to have a notice of award ready to go by the end of next week.
The bid deadline and opening was originally scheduled for last Thursday, but it was extended a few days.
McGowan said Thursday that all of the companies that requested copies of the plans and indicated intent to bid – plan holders – are given addendums throughout the bidding process to answer questions and provide clarifications, and a third addendum was distributed digitally to them Nov. 19.
He said the addendum provided a more detailed description of the building.
“It cracked down on specifics,” said Tucker England, project manager with Precision Engineering. “It made sure that they knew what they had to have with the building.”
The extension was intended to provide the potential contractors with time to check with their materials suppliers on costs and such, McGowan said.
As of the original deadline of 2 p.m. Thursday, one bid had been received, but because the deadline was extended and to ensure that company had addressed any changes that may have been needed after the third addendum, that bid package was returned to the company, which had a representative present.
On Tuesday, the city’s finance officer, Madi Griffin, opened the bids in the presence of two people from Precision Engineering, representatives from all six companies that bid, McGowan and a few other city employees and this GN1 writer. As she opened each, she read the name of the company then glanced through the pages checking for the inclusion of certain details and tabulated figures as necessary before reading aloud the total bid amount.
Five of the bids were in the range between nearly $1.3 million and nearly $1.6 million. The outlier was a bid for $779,000 from Concentric Corp. of America, which does business as Staco Building Co. and is based in London, Ky. It was this company that had submitted the sole bid last week.
After Griffin read the amount, she handed the package over to McGowan, who also briefly looked through each set of documents.
“I appreciate everybody coming out and your interest in the project,” England said, and McGowan thanked those present as well.
He said he was “most definitely” pleased with the number of companies bidding.
“I feel like we got some competitive bids and we got the one that’s really low,” McGowan said.
He added later that he would be “tickled to death” if they can end up going with that lowest bid, and it’s relatively close to the amount Precision Engineering had estimated, especially when compared with the others.
Kathy McGuire, director of business development with Precision, said situations with such a vast difference in the bid amounts like this are a prime reason why they’ll need to sit down and carefully look over the bids to make sure everything’s there, and McGowan added that they’d want to make sure they understood what they were bidding before it could be chosen. They are also likely to check references, particularly for companies with which they’re less familiar.
The city was able to obtain grant funds for at least a portion of the construction, but those and only the city’s required matching funds won’t be enough.
April Russell, the city’s grant writer/administrator and city administrator, had earlier told Glasgow News 1 that the Kentucky agriculture development grant application the city submitted required that the city also get financial support from the ag development boards in each of the counties where the vendors are based – in this case, Barren, Allen and Hart counties, she said. The Allen County board provided $2,500; $10,000 came from Hart County and Barren County’s board put in $70,000 of its funds toward the project, Russell said. Then, after a presentation to the state board at one of its meetings this summer and a subsequent vote at that meeting, the city was awarded a $250,000 grant. The city has to match that amount, she said, and that amount is budgeted.
The plan holders had been provided with a blueprint version of how the building will look, how it will be positioned on the property, etc., but McGowan said a rendering without all the technical information and more easily digested by the general public is expected to be drawn up by the architect and released in the next couple of weeks or so.
The new home for the farmers market is going to be on property the City of Glasgow owns along the 400 block of West Main Street between the post office to the west and, to the east, what will be a relocated Ford Drive and a justice center to be constructed beginning next year for Barren County.
The city would then lease the facility to Sustainable Glasgow, the nonprofit organization that manages the Bounty of the Barrens Farmers Market.
The blueprint calls for the “front” of the building to be on the end of it that faces West Main Street and for the back end to be toward West Water Street. The building is to be roughly centered within that block of land, with the entrance off West Water for now. Another entrance from Ford Drive that is shown on the blueprint may come later, McGowan said, but one of the addendums called for it to be left out at this point.
Looking at the design from the front or back ends, the overall shape somewhat resembles some types of barns, with a taller, open-loft type center section and shorter side extensions, except that one of those side extensions will essentially be a covered porch that extends the entire length from front to back, while the other is enclosed as part of the building.
The taller center section, as viewed from the front and back ends, is to have a regular double door flanked by a garage-type door on each side. The porch side – to face Ford Drive – is to have a single regular door in the center and two garage-type doors on each side of it. The opposite longer side of the building, facing the post office, would just have the single regular door in the center and no garage-type doors. The blueprint shows the west-facing “side extension” as being the location for bathrooms, and that single door would be the entrance for those parking in the handicapped-accessible spots along that side of the facility.