Good Morning Cheyenne County,
We hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday. As we said before we are still working on several issues that we hope to bring forth in the new year. There is so much still we need to talk about and we will start bringing up many new things after the first of the year. One that can’t wait however is the county’s bid for a new HVAC system.
This past month the county put out for bid a new HVAC system for our county building in downtown, Sidney. As we said in the previous post, the county received only one bid from the company that services the units now and is recommending the replacement. Interesting in itself. We would like to slow down this process because it appears now we are wasting a lot of money.
The Bid….
We contacted the county clerk who kindly gave us a copy of the bid. Thank you to the clerk and our county workers for quickly getting us this information. We have put a link to a pdf of the bid below. The bid is outrageous in many aspects. There are no cost breakdowns, very few line item details, and a huge overblown final cost. The call-outs and exclusions are so vague that there could be huge cost overruns that will cost us many times this.
We are used to reading bids. We have done this a lot. This is not a bid. It is too vague. As we said earlier beside the lack of details, this bid is so overpriced and exceeds the national average for HVAC systems which is $15-$18 per sq/ft.. We need to slow down this process, get more bids and take our time with this very expensive system. We need to save some money.
American Rescue Plan…
This money is coming from our taxes, back to us through the American Rescue Plan. The commissioners have decided to spend some of this plan money on the new HVAC system. This is our money though. Remember that. We need to make sure that it is spent wisely. This bid is in no way wise spending of money. First, the company comes out of Cheyenne, WY. So all we get for ¾ of a million dollars is a new system. Would it be great if our local contractors could do this work so ALL the money circulates through our local economy instead of going to Cheyenne, WY? We have been talking to several local HVAC contractors. It may not be possible, but we need to try. Let’s work together and see if this money can stay here.
Costs….
As we said previously the national average for a new HVAC system install is 400sp/ft per ton and about $2,000 per ton. So if we installed all new ducts, vents, controls system…. EVERYTHING it should be no more than $500,000 according to the national average. You can see this bid is over $766,000 just to replace the units without new ducts etc. Way too much.
In the bid, you can see the boilers, units, etc. We priced them. New boilers run $13,000 each. So $26,000 for 2 new ones. We priced a lot of the equipment as shown in the bid and can’t see more than $150,000 in possible costs. Why is the bid $766,837? How bloated is this bid because this is county government and no one looks closely?
As we have said earlier, we are not experts, but we have built several large buildings and worked with many different bids in our businesses careers. We have talked to several HAVC engineers and people who install systems in large buildings. All say this bid is outrageous. We need to slow this process down.
On Tuesday we have asked for a special time to talk at the next commissioners’ meeting. We would like to present some ideas to them before they spend this money. We would like to have an HVAC engineer look at our plans and make some recommendations and then put the bid out once again to get some better prices. Our county is just spending too much money on this in our opinion. Let’s come together as a community to save some money so we have some extra money we can spend on other needs in the county.
Below is a link to a pdf we made of the bid. For any contractors out there, please take a look. Any help is appreciated.
https://bringbacksidney.com/…/Cheyenne_County_HVAC_Bid.pdf