The Flowery Branch City Council voted unanimously Thursday night to reject current bids on the Wastewater Reclamation Facility project and will appoint a new contractor.
Flowery Branch hired Infratec Consultants in February 2017 to complete designs for the expansion of the city’s wastewater treatment facility. Those designs were completed and submitted to the city council in May 2022. The bidding process for the project opened in July, with the lowest of three bids coming in at $52,095,000. The highest bid was $56,980,000. The city had previously obtained a $23.3 million loan from the Georgia Environmental Finance Authority.
According to officials, the discrepancy between the bids and the loan prompted the city to reevaluate the design with help from ESG, Engineering, Inc. The resulting recommendation was to reject all three bids and begin the design portion of the project anew. Thursday’s vote begins a request for qualifications for a Construction Manager at Risk (CMAR). The new role will work closely with the city council, as well as project engineers, in order to provide cost estimation throughout the design process.
Council member Joe Anglin said having a liaison between all parties involved will help keep a strong flow of communication along with keeping the project on budget.
“The main thing is we're gonna go with a construction management firm to come in and pretty much be the set of eyes on the project,” Anglin said. “They guarantee a certain price, and they have to adhere to that, and anything that goes over that they have to foot the bill for. So we just feel like with the price that came in, it was substantially higher than we thought. So we needed to go just step back.”
During the council meeting, a Flowery Branch local spoke against rejecting the project plans, stating the project has been a long time coming, and even with the current bid, it would be better to move forward now rather than later. Anglin addressed the concerns but emphasized that the $52 million bid would skyrocket much higher when interest on the loan and other factors kicked in.
“You know, the $52 million was the bid, and then obviously, we're not sitting on $52 million,” Anglin said. “So we'd have to go either issue the bonds or get a loan for that. And over the life of those bonds, over the life of that loan, it would have been roughly $100 million, and that's a tremendous amount of money to service a bet on. And that wouldn't just be a burden on the developers. But it would be a hefty burden on the current users too.”
There is no current estimate on when the Construction Manager at Risk will be hired, or when the design process will begin again
