Chester CountyPRESS
www.chestercounty.com
Covering Avon Grove, Chadds Ford, Kennett Square, Oxford, & Unionville Areas
Volume 152, No. 29
60 Cents
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
INSIDE A classic musical
at Longwood
Board agrees to $4.3 million price tag for new police facility By Richard L. Gaw Staff Writer
Destination Delaware special section
A classic family tale comes to the stage...1B Photo by John Chambless
‘The Music Man’ is this year’s musical spectacular by the Brandywiners, coming to the Open Air Theatre at Longwood Gardens beginning on July 26. See story on Page 1B.
After more than two years of presentations, architectural renderings, preliminary approvals and wrangling over where to find the money to pay for it, the $4,347,318 it will cost to build the new home for the Southern Chester County Regional Police Department was agreed to by the New Garden Township Board of Supervisors at their July 16 meeting, by a vote of 5-0. During a presentation by Sean Goodrick of Tevebaugh Architecture, the board approved the costs for all four components of the facility’s construction. Goodrick said that the bids were opened on June 19 at the township building and read aloud to the public, in accordance with bidding instructions, and the contrac-
tors were chosen on the basis of their submitting the “lowest responsible” bids. The general construction of the facility was awarded to Uhrig Construction, Inc., for the amount of $3.1 million; the mechanical construction will be performed by Clipper Pipe and Service for $337,000; the plumbing installation will be managed by Vision Mechanical, Inc., for $409,165; and the electrical construction was awarded to Cooks Service Company at a price of $488,810. Goodrick told the supervisors that the project received a large amount of bids, “more so than I have seen on many recent projects,” he said. “In addition, the bids were extremely close, meaning that everyone was in theory looking at the same thing on the drawings. There was not a lot of assumed misinterpretation of the data on the drawings. It is our understanding, based on that, that these are, essen-
tially, the best prices you can get for that project on those drawings.” Goodrick told the board that the price tag will also include an additional $300,000 for furniture, fixtures and equipment, and that the project could see a 3 to 5 percent increase in the overall cost due to “change orders,” the unforeseen conditions and expenditures that often arise during construction. “I’ve never seen a perfect set of documents,” he said. “It’s a fact of construction that we aren’t putting together a kit that’s been built 50 times before. This is a unique building for a unique problem. Undoubtedly, there are imperfections in that process.” Natalie Malawey-Ednie, a senior project manager with Watchdog Real Estate Project Managers, has been hired by the township to oversee construction. “Your biggest exposure
Oxford Borough Council reviews parking Township receives traffic-calming garage bids Child welfare staff gets statewide awards...5A
INDEX
One more push for grant funding is already underway By Steven Hoffman Staff Writer
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At the Oxford Borough Council meeting on Monday night, Steve Krug reviewed Opinion........................7A the bids that the borough Obituaries...................2B has received for the multimodal transportation center Classifieds..................4B project—the first time that the borough has had actual project costs to work with instead of just projections. As it turns out, the projections were accurate. Krug is the architect who has facilitated the parking garage project for the borough since a parking study was completed in 2015. He explained that when the bids were received on June 26, the lowest eligible bid on the base project totaled about $7.3 million. That total includes about $404,000 in building permit fees that had to factored into the base bid. However, the borough has the option of not collecting that fee since, in this case, the developer is the borough itself. That would reduce the actual costs of the project to about $6.9 million.
That leaves a significant gap in the funding for the project for the borough to account for. A majority of council members may not support borrowing in excess of $3 million to pay for the project since the potential tax burden on residents has been a primary concern throughout the process of planning for the garage. The fate of the project likely hinges on whether the borough can secure additional grant funding from state and county sources in the coming months. “We’re pursuing additional grant funding,” Krug said. Krug explained that the bids that were submitted are valid for 90 days, so that would mean that the borough could award a contract for the project up until Sept. 24. The borough could also request a 30-day extension on that date, Krug said, which would move the last day to award a bid to Oct. 23. What transpires between now and that date will likely determine whether the borough can
move forward on the project. If additional funding can be secured, the amount that the borough would need to borrow might be acceptable to borough officials and residents. For most of the last three years, the borough has been applying for funding from state and county sources, and has been enormously successful in the effort. Borough manager Brian Hoover explained that the borough has a total of approximately $4,618,077 in funding already secured, which is more than 60 percent of the project’s costs. That figure includes grants from state and county sources, as well as more than $1 million that the borough was gifted for a new borough administration building. A new administration building is included as part of the project. Pauline Garcia-Allen of Econ Partners has been leading the efforts to secure grant funding for the borough. Garcia-Allen updated borough council about the
solutions for West Grove development
Photo by Richard L. Gaw
London Grove Township is working with a transportation engineering firm to explore potential solutions to the speed limit and safety violations being reported in the Preserve at Inniscrone development in West Grove.
By Richard L. Gaw Staff Writer To best address concerns that had been earlier heard from residents in the Preserve at Inniscrone development at a recent London Grove Township Board of Supervisors
meeting, the township’s supervisors requested -and recently received -- a preliminary traffic calming evaluation that created possible solutions to ease the alarming rate of speeding and cut-through traffic in the development. Continued on Page 3A
Continued on Page 4A
Taking flight at Dulles
Courtesy photo © 2007 The Chester County Press
Continued on Page 2A
The 86 campers who attended the first of two Future Aviators Summer Camps at the New Garden Flying Field this summer were recent visitors at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s annex at the Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Va. Now in its tenth season, the camp introduces youngsters to the science of aviation through airplane construction, aeromodeling, rocketry, passenger flights with licensed pilots and museum tours. To learn more, visit www.newgardenflyingfield.com, or call 610-268-2619.
Another kind of occupational hazard It used to be that frivolous libel lawsuits and economic boycotts were the ways to punish the media for doing their job of reporting news. That’s what happened to me in my newspaper publishing career. These methods of retaliation were effective in causing economic hardships for media owners, not the editors and reporters, who were employees only. With the recent Annapolis, Md., mass murders of five newspaper employees in their own newsroom, including an advertising salesperson, the danger has become one of personal safety for all media employees. This strange twist is very troubling. It appears that new laws are needed to treat physical intimidation of media employees just the same as intimidation of law enforcement employees, lest our freedom of speech rights be compromised ... and that would be a tragedy for America. (This is an occasional column written by Uncle Irvin. As always, the column is the opinion of Uncle Irvin, and is not a news story.)