March 5, 2019 Sewer Committee Meeting Notes

Ballston Lake Sewer Project Update  Last month's meeting of the Town of Ballston Sewer Committee was on February 5, 2019.  The meeting only lasted 7 minutes. Bill Goslin announced that the low bidder for the lake project pulled out stating that they (Carver) made an error. The project now has bids that are over estimated cost and the Town Supervisor and Goslin closed the February meeting and invited the attorneys and the engineers into executive session.

At the February 25, 2019 Town Board Meeting, the board passed a resolution to reject the bids for the BLSD project. No updates to date (3-10-19) on the town’s Ballston Sewers website. The last minutes posted on the town’s website for this committee was from December 4, 2019 and since then there has been 2 monthly meetings and multiple nonpublic sessions.  The residents in the BLSD are very frustrated with the town’s lack of communication.  

On March 5th the committee held it's regular monthly meeting. This meeting was recorded to assist in note taking.  The following contains open discussion of the state of the Ballston Lake Sewer District.

Sewer Committee Meeting

Town of Ballston

Notes taken by a resident on March 5, 2019 4:00pm

In Attendance:
Dick Doyle, William Goslin, Drew Hamelink, Ed Hernandez, Debra Kaelin, Kim Kotkoskie, Kathryn Serra, Bruce Steves, Tim Szczepaniak Guests & Observers: Ruth Osterlitz, Carl Thurnau, and a representative from Clifton Park

4:02pm Opening of meeting by Kim Kotkoskie stating that she did not prepare an agenda for this month.

Bill Goslin: I think we can touch a few points here at this meeting. Perhaps we could talk about the tasks that we sent people out to complete and what they yielded and how we move forward. Might generate some conversation topics.

Tim Szczepaniak: I read each report and I would like to talk the difference there with the reports. I would like to go over all the bills and make sure we are good with that.

Kim K. I did create a summary that Katheryn, Ed and I have reviewed from our visits.

Bill Goslin: I have summarized that even further. The team went out and talked with the contractors and this is the result of the conversations with the contractors. We also have this summarized by each engineering firm that was at the meeting. Basically the notes say that there is an opportunity to save money or there could be an opportunity to save money on maintenance of traffic, directional drilling, materials, pre-clearance, restoration, overtime, insurance, parking conditions, and well, insurance again because I am adding to that because it is not something that we had with the contractors but market conditions and the size of the job. Now we could get into each one, look at each one, we could discuss each one but those are the areas that we think where we could save some money. Let’s just leave it at that and can get into those if we have time.

We have a recommendation on how to move forward from three different engineering firms.

· Kimberly Kotkoskie, CREEC, PLLC

· Ed Hernandez, Adirondack Mountain Engineering, P.C.

· Kathryn Serra, CT Male Associates

Ed Hernandez: We met with the various contractors and they made some pretty good points. I think they provided us with some information that could be used to reduce some costs. Each of the recommendations have pros and cons that we would need to discuss if we were to incorporate the change. I felt that the two bids that we got based on other projects are very high. I was happy to see a project recently get bids that received quite a few bids and after talking with the contractors that bid on that and did not bid on ours found that they thought our project was too large for them based on the projects that they have now. So, I thought it would be beneficial to re-package it and break up into smaller contracts that are in the neighborhood of 3 to 4 million dollars and go back out to the street and see what kind of prices we get. I thought that we could do that pretty cost effectively and that is my recommendation.

Tim Szczepaniak: When you say cost effectively, what are we looking at cost wise?

Ed Hernandez: We are not changing any of the contracts or conditions or general conditions so there will be limited legal review that will be required. Since I have to change the plans and the bid documents and go through another cycle of bidding and answering all the questions and doing all that. I estimate that our fees would be estimated at $15,000. I offered to waive that if after we do all that and the bids come in too high to move forward, we would waive those fees so the town does not have any additional costs but if it does come in then we would look to get paid for that additional work.

Bill Goslin: There may be some changes to made based on the contractor notes we have.

Ed Hernandez: My estimate is based on just re-packaging this, if I have to go out and count every tree that is a different story.

Tim Szczepaniak: I have a question for CT Male, Katheryn what is this here? Stated here in your evaluation you recommended to stagger the bid openings by a day. Can you explain as far as breaking it down into smaller projects and staggering the bidding here in your recommendation?

Kathryn Serra: What we are proposing would be five contracts looking at a potential pool of bidders in a project that is in the 3-5 million dollar range we had like 12 bidders on a project. The reason we are recommending staggering by a day is someone might bid on all they could handle and if they lose the first bid, they can bid on the next. It gives them flexibility and gives them the opportunity to bid on the part of the job they are interested in. Some contractors may only want the pump station and not want directional drilling. Some contractors may not want to get involved with directing traffic and bid on a job that did not involve the road. It allows for competition because we can show the prior bids to the next bidder and they could see the other guy was $100 a foot and they were $110 and that is where they lost the job, so they adjust the next day bid.

Chad was not able to be here, but he said, “If you do not re-bid this in the Spring of 2019 you probably will never do the project.” That is almost 25 years’ experience and 10 years’ experience as a public works engineer. If you take a year to figure out what you are doing it is just going to increase project costs. You have people who architected the plan, you have three good contractors who bid on the work already. All three of those companies made a significant investment in bidding the original job. I forget the number, but it was between $50,000 - $100,000 dollars.

Drew Hamelink: I would think that it would demonstrate to EFC who we will be asking for more money that we are doing our do diligence trying to really understand the numbers.

Goslin: Let’s not go there here.

Kathryn Serra: Rebidding it sounds a little intimidating and it is going to be some work. He is going to have to repackage stuff but it going to be the same times five and needs to be consistent. Don’t sit on this. The idea of having the contractor pay for overtime – I highly suggest that be removed. The insurance, you do not need builders’ risk for the entire job. There are little things that can be removed.

Tim Szczepaniak: I get very nervous about reducing any insurance here.

Kathryn Serra: We do projects like this all the time and we would professionally disagree with the Town’s insurance carrier. Your insurance carrier requested the contractors have pollution control liability.

Ed Hernandez: This projected is bonded. It is already insurance and we do not take over the project until it is complete and working and also do not see the need to have all this insurance liability.

Kathryn Serra: Builder’s risk really should only apply to the pump station. I suggest you pin it to that part of the project and that is just a half of a million-dollar job.

There are several factors that I say can be removed: Overtime, Maintenance and protection of traffic. I think you can have road closures. You can use plates.

Kimberly Kotkoskie: I have been extremely focused on budget. What I heard from our contractor discussion is a total of approximately 1 million in savings. I understand who I was talking to and maybe its really 5 million savings or more but our budget today would require for construction to fit into 10 million dollars so that would be 8.6 million dollars off. We asked each contractor, “how much time did you invest in putting your bids together” and they said 3 and half weeks with an estimator putting these lines together. I think rebidding is a great concept and every engineer in the world would love that bottom threshold number to then go and apply for grants in the future. I do not think it is worth it to rebid in pieces and the management of the pieces afterwards would be a challenge to have that many different contracts and pieces. That is why to that option I said no to.

Ed Hernandez: There would be some additional costs with that.

Kimberly Kotkoskie: I would completely agree that you would see lower numbers, but I do not see it being 8.6 million. I was going to option two, making it into different districts over a ten-year period and starting over but then I went to the third option and that I landed on. We had a call with the EFC (Environmental Facilities Corporation is holding the loan consisting of 75% of the original Map, Plan and Report project cost) and they want us to start next month applying for grant money and cited numerous grants that they thought we would be eligible for. So, the reason that really takes option one and two and made me lean towards no to those and looking at our resources and rather than rebidding lets use those resources towards applying for grants.

Goslin: We have from all engineers an opportunity to save money. I would say that based on discussions with EFC and based on discussion that Tim and I have had privately for other funding resources that there may be a significant opportunity for us to get additional money and so I think what it really comes down to determining when you would go out and rebid if you wanted to do the whole project at once which the main advantage of that is that you do not have to divide it into districts because it would be years doing that and see if you could lower the cost and increase the amount of funds that you have for the project. If those two come together than you win, if they don’t come together you at least understand more about the situation than you do now.

· We could not do anything and give 1.7 million dollars back to the state

· We could work on this immediate challenge of re-bidding the project and apply for more grants

· We could break it up to smaller districts over years

I would like the group to concentrate on the middle option and I do not want to talk about additional funding here. That is confidential and let’s just say that there are funding sources available.

Tim Szczepaniak: I have talked to one of the bidders myself and he said he could do this job in 11 months and he also said that if we broke the project up into smaller project, he would not bid on it.

Ed, how do we know we would get the same turn out if we split it up? Can we find out first?

Ed Hernandes: You can reach out to the local contractors and ask just by a phone call.

If you do split it up to different jobs, what happens if no one bids on a certain portion?

Ed Hernandez: That is always a risk. Highly unusual. If it happens, you put it right back out to bid. It does cause delays.

Ed Hernandez: The grants are all over the place and we would need to look over each one. Some are full of conditions. Some may not be worth it.

Goslin: Kim is suggesting that she get together with CT Male’s grant writer and come up with an agenda for the call to EFC. We have a team that is ready to go, and we do not want to spend money that we do not want to spend. Prepare an agenda for EFC

Kathryn Serra: What our grant writer would do is take the 6 grants EFC recommended he would look them over and give his opinion on what we would have a chance of getting. You need to be careful on applying for grants because you could drop $10k applying for something and you could not have a chance getting it.

Goslin: This will have to be a Town Board decision. The next board meeting is to quick, that is next week. We need a couple weeks.

Tim Szczepaniak: Kim, are we good with the bills?

Kimberly Kotkoskie: No, my contract has lapsed at this point.

Tim Szczepaniak: We can take care of that in executive session.

Kimberly Kotkoskie: We have to set up the emanate domain and what the town wants done. Right now, the appraisals and the title searches are like 95 percent done. I would hate to walk away from that. We need to look at that and discuss it. We also had a communication today from EFC that I was disappointed in.

Goslin: We can talk about all that later in executive session. Tim and I will go into executive session now with Dick Doyle about another funding opportunity.

Adjourned 4:50pm

You can read notes taken by a resident at the February 25, 2019 Town Board meeting pertaining to the BLSD by clicking here: Notes 2-25-19 BLSD

It will be interesting to find out what other funding source they have. The next monthly meeting of the Sewer Committee is April 2, 2019 at 4:00pm and is open to public observation.