County reassessing renovation of courthouse office

With multiple county offices moving to the newly constructed annex, Young County officials are looking to renovate some of the offices in the courthouse.

One of the offices that will be renovated is the former tax assessor-collector’s office, which will be turned into the new auditor’s office. However, the project will be on hold for a while longer due to a lack of bids received for the work.

At commissioners court Monday, Aug. 26, the county received one bid for the project from Mann Made Construction, the same company that completed the new annex building. The bid came in at $398,000, which was a higher amount than the county had estimated.

Justin Gilmore, of Level 5 Architecture who has worked on the design plans for the renovation, shared that there may be ways to bring down the overall cost of the project.

“A lot of things that we made some assumptions on, we’ve gone ahead and put in this bid package to replace and renew everything,” Gilmore said. “There’s some opportunities to really pull back from that, if we get into it and we realize that we don’t need to do all the flooring or anything like that.”

Some aspects of the overall project required more work than the county may have anticipated going into it based on the age and deterioration of the office as it currently stands.

“There’s a roof drain that is in that vault area that’s in that tax assessor’s office that’s been leaking for some time. It’s causing quite a bit of problems,” Gilmore said. “This project addresses that roof drain leaking. So we’ve got several things that we’ve got to do in that project.”

County commissioners requested Gilmore obtain a more detailed breakdown of the individual costs that made up the total amount of Mann Made Construction’s bid. This would allow them to determine where cuts could be made, if any.

“(The bid is) not broken down. All we asked for was a lump sum amount from the contractor,” Gilmore said. “But as part of our evaluation, I’ll be glad to ask for a little bit of a cost breakdown so we can understand where these monies are allocated from, what goes into the project itself.”

Level 5 Architecture began inspecting and planning the renovation of the TAC office back in May. Near the end of July, Gilmore returned with design plans for the project, which he estimated at the time would come in at a cost between $300,000-350,000.

“The tax assessor-collector’s office, as it currently stands, will essentially be gutted. Really, it’s an open space already, which is great, but the front reception counter that’s currently there would all be taken away,” he said at a commissioners court meeting Monday, July 22. “...We had a preliminary budget before we went into this, between ($300,000) to $350,000 for this entire project, and I still think that that’s going to hold true.”

While the county only received the one official bid from Mann Made Construction, Gilmore shared there were other contractors interested but in the last few days decided not to submit bids.

At their next scheduled meeting Monday, Sept. 9, the commissioners will receive the feedback and breakdown of the one bid and determine appropriate next steps at that time.