The Indian Trail Improvement District Board of Supervisors on Wednesday, Feb. 12 approved a new contractor to finish Acreage Community Park’s southern expansion.
Project Manager Jim Orf said the district has found a contractor, Loren Jock Trucking, who is willing to work with the district to finish the park after the board ended its contract with Rosso Site Development due to work deficiencies.
“We’ve been working diligently to try to get an agreement with them, and it’s something that we can accept,” Orf said. “We’ve been working through two attorneys to get the agreement spelled out.”
Orf explained that the contract will be on a time and materials basis for an estimated 90-day contract.
“He wasn’t able to get a lot of subcontractors to come in and price out the known items, but we did get a contract amount of a little over $40,000 on the striking, sidewalk marking, wheel stops and things like that for the parking lot,” he said. “Unfortunately, there’s a lot of rework and other work that needs to be done that it’s complicated to get a price for.”
Orf added that a surveyor will be needed to do some rework with the retention ponds and football field. He estimated it will be a little over $240,000 total to finish the work.
“It’s time and materials, so if he hires an asphalt contractor to put extra layers of asphalt, it will be negotiated at a price that we will have to work on,” he said, adding that the contract was a fair price for everybody for an unfinished project that they were stepping into.
ITID President Betty Argue asked if the contractor finishes the park sooner than 90 days, would it reduce the price of the contract?
“It’s for the time worked. If we get done, it will get knocked back to the time they were on the job,” Orf said, adding that he and the contractor were still working on a list of subcontractors to work on the project, which would be submitted to the board.
Supervisor Jennifer Hager made a motion to approve the contract, which carried 5-0.
In other business, the board approved the purchase of 720 feet of 84-inch steel-reinforced polyethylene pipe at a cost of $260,310 to replace culverts at three major east/west canal crossings, one on Hall Blvd. and two on 140th Avenue North. The order is to prepare canal crossings in anticipation of a Florida Department of Transportation traffic-calming project due to start in November.
ITID Assistant Executive Director Rob Robinson said he had conferred with ITID Engineer Jay Foy about the quality of the pipe, as opposed to concrete, and the 100-year polyethylene pipe had a comparable life at about half the cost. Joint assembly also contributed to the cost savings, as well as the relatively large order, Robinson said. Shipping from a company in Alabama constituted $27,750 of the cost.
Argue asked about the cost of concrete as an alternative, and Foy said the concrete culverts are in 4-foot sections that are much harder to fit than the polyethylene pipe, which would about double the cost of the projects. The only disadvantage is that the polyethylene pipe must have backfill compacted around it, he said.
Robinson said the project will be similar to others that the in-house culvert crews are doing, except the diameter of the pipe will be much larger.
Hager made a motion to approve the purchase, which carried 5-0.
The board also agreed by consensus to search for a consultant to prepare a strategic plan for the district, at a cost of up to $40,000.
Argue said she is concerned that the district does not have a strategic plan.
“I think it’s essential with all of the things that we are working on,” she said. “If we have a strategic plan, it starts to bring things together for us and for the community. It doesn’t matter who’s sitting up here, or who’s out there, they’ll understand what our strategic plan is.”
ITID Executive Director Burgess Hanson pointed out the advantages of having a neutral facilitator to develop a plan, and he felt that could be done for less than $40,000. “I don’t think we’ll spend a lot of money to put together and write an initial statement and vision,” he said.
Hanson said an independent consultant to work with the board and himself as a bystander was important so that the final statement would not be perceived as a plan that came from staff.
“Our approach, from a staff perspective, is once you do all that, then we come up with the tactical goals every budget year and make sure that we’re hitting the mark that the board has set,” he said.
