It’s back to the drawing board on constructing a new building for county offi ces after the construction costs turned out to be more than double what was originally estimated.
Durant a meeting last week of Bryan County Commissioners Scott Goad, Justin Boone and Brandon Carr, it was revealed that the cost from Mid-Plains Construction to construct a two-story building would be almost $5 million whereas the original estimate was $2,300,000.
The building, that would be constructed on Fourth Avenue, would be used for county offices and the District Attorney’s Office would have moved to the current courthouse annex.
Goad asked how the bid went from an estimate of $2 million to about $5 million.
Shane Knight of Theorem architecture said that was a good question.
“I don’t know and we’ve crunched and looked and I don’t know how we would build a more competitive building,” Knight said. “There’s things that we can pull out but we can’t pull out half of the cost and things just continue to increase and this obviously surprised us all.”
Commissioners said their hand are tied and that American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds have been allocated for the building that must be spent by Dec. 31, 2026, so construction would need to start by the end of 2025.
A single-story building was suggested instead of two story, but that would require a complete change of plans. The District Attorney’s Office is in the old Plaza theater building that is dilapidated.
“The plan was to build a new office for the district attorney,” Goad said. “We sat down and talked with him one day and he made mention that he’d prefer to have this building if it were an option. I didn’t think anybody here would want to move. It turns out everybody would like to have more room. So, the thought was we’ll build a new building to facilitate this office and this could be remodeled and turned into a D.A.’s office. It sounds like that may not pan out. So, maybe we need to shift and look at doing a building comparable that works for the district attorney’s office.”
Knight said that a single- story building would get construction costs significantly down.
The vote on the costs was tabled and commissioners will address it again at a future meeting.