All right, four o'clock. So it's the witching hour. So let's call the special meeting of the Monroe
County Capital Improvement Board for January 9th, 2026 to order. And we will begin by, I'll ask Mr.
Parrish to take the role. John Weichart, present. Doug Bruce. Jeff McCann, here. Joyce Bowling, here.
Adam Teague. Jim Silverstein, here. Jay Baer, here.
Thank you. We have one item of business on the agenda. A request for approval of change order in excess
of twenty five thousand dollars for some foundation work. Barry are you presenting this. I'm giving
the intro and everybody has a little bit of a part in it. Everybody doesn't. So as you know when potential
change orders come about and they're over twenty five
thousand that we need to bring it to the board in the fall. There's an issue that just came up since
Tuesday and that has to do with preparing of the subgrade for the building. Even though we have steel
above us we still have a lot of prep work to do below that level and at the slab and below level. So
the potential change order is
significant in its dollar value, and we thought it was prudent of us to make sure you all understood
why we are asking this. So with that, we have a series of slides to go through so that you understand
what this issue is, as you'll, I'm sure, have to answer to our community here and there when questions
come up. And so we'll start off with giving some facts.
Yeah, so I'll start. So this is Sarah Hempstead for everybody online. So we knew we were going to do
this while there's not great. The slab was designed to accommodate that as much as possible based on
all the extensive geotechnical report. And so we have there's a little section of the slab, which includes
some things that we don't always include like a geogrid, which is essentially a metal
a very spitty mesh that goes underneath the subgrade, that's that red line right there, to create a
consistent stable surface for the slab. As we have moved through the site, just encountered some areas
that, due to the site itself, due to the weather, where the under-surface material is just not as stable
as we'd like it to be. And so that's really what this change order is. It's where we encounter those areas,
taking the soil down to where it needs to be, putting a new solid under surface, and then building a
slab, as it was. It is pretty much exactly what contributing it's design to do is help us sub-surface
material. The alternative to doing something like this would be to say, let's assume that everywhere
twice as much soil is bad than we think might be. And we could have done that. Let's scrape the whole site.
twice as much as we might possibly need to be, but it's a much more expensive way to go about it. This
is the cheapest list. As we find it, we'll mitigate. Yeah, so just as a background of the project status,
Andrew shared with Little Brothers Project Manager. So we are preparing for the silent grade, the subgrade,
the geogranite, and the packed stone. So basically we have
subgrade, whether that's native soil or stone backfill, to get to grade. We put the geogrid down and
put a foot of compacted 53s for concrete. That's where we're at now. Obviously, as we see across the
road, we see in this picture, our steel activities have progressed to where our long-span trusses are
set. Now we're getting ready for all of our underground to get out of the ground with our slab on grade.
As far as sequencing, again, so we complete our foundations, we erect our steel, and then
final preparations for the subgrade, which is after all the heavy equipment and everything. It's kind
of demode and got out of the way. So we didn't want to do any prep work for this soil. Whenever we knew
we were going to have cranes and boom lifts and walls, everything else here, because we would have just
tore it up and doubled our work. So again, now we're to that point where we're going to place the geodegraded
stone and everything. So again, could not stabilize the subgrade prior. Now we're to that point where
we can address it. There's a couple of things that we've done.
that tried to prevent as much damage as possible. So as we progressed on a weekly basis, we'd go in
and back-drag, kind of remove the water that we could at the standing water and everything. And also
on this bottom right picture, contractors paid a lot of money to have about a foot and a half stone
fill job sites that could train the boomless and we were tracking through this and create the sinkholes.
So that's some protection.
with this change order, the progression plan is we'll have Paul Woodzing who did the geotechnical report
come out, basically an observation. So as they go through, they say, hey, remove this material and down
to a suitable soil, fill it with stone up to that subgrade level just to give us true subgrade that
can sustain the geogrid, make it work to its true potential. So that's kind of the game plan with this
change based off their walks.
So we have asked federal brothers to estimating where we think this condition will land where we can
have a protective figure and not see the entire site. Andrew I don't know if you'd like to go into a
little bit of how you determine that. Yeah honestly it was a lot of assumptions. There's some areas
we made six inches and some areas
be two feet, some areas it could be worse on one half of the job versus the other. So we kind of broke
it out into our quadrants and tried to say, okay, well, we can assume we may be a foot and a half here
based off of what we're observing right now. But Alden-Witzig has been on site since we broke around
July and think periodically to determine where we're at, soils and stuff. So again, this is our best
judgment, safest possible worst case scenario where we'll be
It will be by truck in a cost that was provided with a lot better forms. So we'll be able to track those
tickets and obviously be saving. This is the dollar figure. And before we ask for any action on this
I just wanted to warn you that with this potential payment. This is where our contingency plans and
our contingency to date
would be just over 500,000. 538, 748, roughly 22 percent contingency. You can see where the original
contingency started at 2.4 million and 3.6 million. So just having that awareness of where we are is
a piece of information
sort of that. Questions? Let's not do questions yet. So this is a recommendation for the board. So I
would ask for a motion to approve the recommendation and then we can have questions or discussion about
the motion. Second. Okay, so we have a motion by Mr. McKim who wanted to be in the minutes in his last
meeting. Seconded by Joyce.
Now, now let's open this up for any questions or discussion for board members. Any questions?
This is totally. This is. Yeah. Any questions? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, no, I guess I just don't understand.
So is this caused by the heavy equipment movement or is this just caused by the fact that we have lots of soil?
I mean, it's a mixture of both, for sure. But the soil is less than ideal. So we encountered a lot of
random fills and stuff. And they ran into that with the geotag report. And then you open that up in
order for us to set steel, get everything gray. And then this time, you hear the freeze, the thaw,
the rain. So does it dry up? Yeah. Which is kind of what I was going to ask the same thing.
So it was a problem we couldn't have anticipated when we did out the whole project. Not the magnitude.
You know, you're going to have some level of it, but it's just impossible to know. Soil samples don't
tell the whole story. Right, right. Yeah, the weather and the precipitation and all that plays into
factors. And then my other follow-up, which always asks this question, are we 22% done with the project?
Based on the value of what's on the site, I'd say yes, sir. Yeah, we are. And again, I think we talked
about this in a lot of the meetings.
Highest risk, I guess, for contingency use is just going to be as we get out of the land. So this big
soiled slab, you know, you're talking 60,000 square feet-ish area that we're trying to address. We only
have a few more things that we're getting out of the ground as far as the deep foundations on the south
side of the project. We did finish all of the concrete foundations across the road. So yeah, last big
puzzle piece. A lot of the ugly stuff is over. The rest of it. There still may be some rock that we
have to remove.
as we go through some of the foundation on the route south side of the field. Yeah, the loading docked
area on the south side of the project is basically our last deep work. That's a small area, too. Yeah,
it's not very large. The detention system is the biggest. So that'll look out past the foundation.
And I guess one one reason for calling this as a special meeting not waiting until the twenty-first
was schedule implications. We were what I was preparing to do under slab and then you know it's a need
to review the upgrade. They had further instruction to get that subgrade statewide. So it has pushed
off that the most slab work of a couple days.
but trying to get this in front of you is possible so that we can move further in place. Okay. Yeah,
and I might mention that when we had our meeting in December, we were about 16%. This is another 6%,
which brings us up to, so this individual one is about 6% of the contingency budget. And I would like
to mention that
This is exactly how it's supposed to work. And we've got to change order this in excess of $25,000.
We had to have a special meeting. You were all good enough to be available. We gave our public notice
of 48 hours. So from Tuesday when we didn't know about this, here we sat on Friday and we're able to
approve it. So I appreciate everybody's work and effort in making today possible and making this happen.
I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, Jeff, do you have another question? Oh yeah, I just on the overall schedule
are still good. Yes, yeah, we are tracking. We have steel that's going to be delivered the Friday before.
Everything's in fabrication ready to sit down here. Good. And the signage is all up. I've noticed on
this. Yeah, we did put the message boards up, but we get the 19th. I think we'll have the remainder
of the signage out through the final walk with city engineers.
Friday, we close Sunday night. Turn the signs, unbag everything. Then have our closure first thing Monday
morning. Again, steel will be on site ready to set up. OK, any other questions? Discussion? Just simply
want to point out that we're approving a contingency change order not to exceed $150,000. We want to
make sure that not to exceed is part of that motion.
So unless there are any other questions or discussion from board members, seeing none, Mr. Parrish,
you want to take the role? John Weichart. Yes. Jeff McKim. Yes. Joyce Poehling. Yes. Adam Tease. Yes.
Jim Silverstein. Yes. All right. There are no other items on the agenda. Happy New Year. And you don't
have to go home if you can't stay here. We are adjourned.