City saves $100K on police station work

Posted 1/30/25

Replacing and upgrading the heating and cooling systems at the Powell Police Department won’t be as pricey as city officials had feared.

At their Jan. 20 meeting, Powell City Council …

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City saves $100K on police station work

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Replacing and upgrading the heating and cooling systems at the Powell Police Department won’t be as pricey as city officials had feared.

At their Jan. 20 meeting, Powell City Council members approved a change order that lowered the project’s budget to $666,999 — a $104,450 drop from the deal they inked with Rawhide Mechanical months ago.

Change orders typically involve unforeseen circumstances that increase the price, “so that’s a bonus, for a change,” said City Administrator Zack Thorington.

The project is being partially funded by a $420,000 grant that’s drawn from the federal American Rescue Plan Act and awarded by the State Loan and Investment Board. Still, it remains well over budget, as city leaders had optimistically projected that the grant could cover not only the police department’s HVAC systems but also those at City Hall and The Commons. 

Those hopes were derailed in September, when no one responded to an initial call for bids. After getting an extension from the state, a second request for bids drew a proposal from Rawhide Mechanical of Cody, but their bid for the three jobs came in at $1.61 million. Council members opted to only move forward with the police station at a quoted price of $771,449. 

When councilors accepted the bid, Kane Morris of Point Architects pledged to try bringing the cost down with value engineering, and those efforts yielded the nearly 15% savings. They determined that the station’s existing roof insulation is in “good condition” and doesn’t have to be replaced, Thorington said; as a result, crews will be able to simply install a new membrane over the top of the current insulation.

Workers have already removed most of the ceilings at the station and are now installing ducts for the new HVAC units, City Building Official Ben Hubbard said last week.

“It is quite a major undertaking due to the accumulation of wires above the ceiling over the years,” he said.

The department’s dispatchers will have to temporarily relocate during the second phase of the project, which Hubbard expects to begin in mid-March.

While the contractors work on the HVAC system in dispatch, he said city crews will take the opportunity to patch up some windows, remove an elevated floor, install new flooring and lower some cabinets.

Hubbard expects the entire project to wrap up by May.

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