Bids opened for Barrington Middle School project

Lowest bid for construction is $51.275 million

By Josh Bickford
Posted 1/19/18

Members of the Barrington School Building Committee said they were pleased with the bids for the new Barrington Middle School project.

Four companies submitted bids to construct the new school …

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Bids opened for Barrington Middle School project

Lowest bid for construction is $51.275 million

Posted

Members of the Barrington School Building Committee said they were pleased with the bids for the new Barrington Middle School project.

Four companies submitted bids to construct the new school building. The bids, which were opened during a public meeting inside the school committee room on Friday morning, ranged from a low bid of $51,275,000 to a high bid of $56,230,000. 

The committee had established a construction budget of $54,200,000.

"I am very pleased," said Patrick Guida, who serves as one of the co-chairs for the Barrington School Building Committee. 

He added that officials still need to complete the review process for the bids. 

"We need to do our due diligence… but overall I'm very pleased," he said.

The bids were opened in alphabetical order during the Friday morning meeting:

1. Bacon Construction — East Providence — $53,197,700

2. Brait Builders Corporation — Marshfield, Mass. — $51,275,000

3. HV Collins Company — Providence — $56,230,000

4. KBE Building Corp./Bentley Builders LLC — Conn. and North Kingstown — $52,125,000

Anna Clancy, a co-chair for the school building committee, said it was reassuring to see all the bids fall within close range of each other.

"That gives us some sense of confidence on these numbers," she added.

Mr. Guida added that if the bids had come in well above the committee's established budget, officials would have had to either put the project out to bid again "quickly" or scrap the entire project.

Now they can begin the review process. 

Officials from the architecture firm, Kaestle Boos Associates, and the owner's project manager, Dan Tavares, will assist members of the school building committee during the bid reviews. 

Officials will take about 10 days to review the bids, and members of the school building committee are hoping to settle on a single bid by the end of the month. The committee is scheduled to meet on Jan. 29, where it will likely vote on a recommended bid. 

The Barrington School Committee is slated to meet in the beginning of February — on both Feb. 1 and Feb. 8 — where it could vote to approve the recommended bid. 

Once the bid is approved and the contract is finalized, work can begin on the new middle school. Officials are still hopeful that construction will start in March, and if all goes as planned, the new school will be open to students in Aug. 2019. 

Officials will begin the review process with the lowest bid, which was offered by Brait Builders Corporation. The packet included with the bid offered a list of similar projects the company has completed. The company listed 10 school construction projects completed within the last six years, including Abington Middle High School, in Abington, Mass. According to documents in the bid, the Abington project cost $80,144,885 and was completed in May 2017. 

Officials are not obligated to select the lowest bid, but can instead choose the lowest qualified bid or the "lowest responsible bidder," said Mr. Guida during an earlier interview. 

Barrington settled on a "design-bid-build" approach to the project, and is not using a "construction manager at risk" or CMAR.

"…whether we should have used a CMAR rather than a design-bid-build arrangement is moot," wrote Mr. Guida in a recent email. "Our attorneys emphatically explained that we would have put ourselves at substantial legal risk if we had engaged a CMAR at the time the decision had to be made on this to accommodate our completion schedule. 

"Even though the state law was modified as of July 1 to make engagement by a municipality of a CMAR more feasible, Barrington does not yet have in place the regulatory support process necessary to accommodate the CMAR model and we certainly didn't have it early last year when the decision was made. Although no one questions the validity of the legal advice, several members of the building committee were disappointed by these circumstances as they would have preferred the CMAR structure.

"That said, other members of the building committee, including some of those involved vocationally in the building industry, had a preference for the design-bid-build model we were ultimately obliged to go with."

Mr. Guida said that even the members of the building committee who initially supported a CMAR model eventually felt compelled to fall back on the design-bid-build model because of "legal reasons."

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