LAURINBURG —The city of Laurinburg is having to look at options for the new North Fire Station, but with construction costs rising it could have an effect on the plan it chooses.
City Manager Charles Nichols spoke to the board Tuesday about the funding the city currently has and what is being done to make up for the extra construction prices.
“When we started this almost three years ago when Hurricane Florence came through and we lost our North Fire Station we really turned over every rock we could to try and find any funding we can,” Nichols said. “If you remember when this started we got some ballpark figures (and) we thought with $1.5 million we could build what we needed … but the past six months to a year construction prices have gone crazy.”
To pay for the station, the city received a $1.25 million grant from GoldenLEAF in December 2019 and $135,898 from FEMA in November 2020.
“Once we hired a cost assessor and started looking at estimated costs for construction, we basically found out that we were about $920,000 shy of what we needed to construct it,” Nichols said. “We haven’t gone out for bid or anything yet but this is what our cost estimator thought it would cost to build what we needed.”
Nichols explained that the city has gone to GoldenLEAF to request an additional $920,000 in August, but due to no funds being available at the time the item was tabled for the October meeting.
“We also took a trip up to the state with Representative Pierce’s assistance and sat down with Speaker of the House Tim Moore to tell everybody what was going on with this fire department and put in a state request,” Nichols said. “The $920,000 was put in the house budget that went to the senate but the senate did reject the budget last week … so we’re still out there for that.”
The plans
“We didn’t want to bid out what we need, not have the funding for it and then come back to council,” Nichols said. “So the plan is to build a base bid of what we think could be constructed on the funding that is secured and then there are two other alternates.”
The base plan at $1.5 million was a three-bay facility that would not be able to put all the equipment in a closed-in and controlled area which could hurt homeowners insurance due to the equipment not being stored “correctly.”
The second plan at $2 million was a fully enclosed three-bay facility that would have two open bays as well with plans to enclose it at a later date.
The final plan was the full build-out of the station at $2.4 million for the five-bay, 10-door facility the city wanted to build originally.
“This isn’t what we would recommend at all but we just wanted to let the council know where we are,” Nichols said. “There are two other funding options but once we go out for bid, and hopefully they come back under, but we want everyone to know where we stand … they’ll be bidding on the base bid and there will be alternates that will have numbers attached to them so we can bring it back to council and say here’s our lowest qualified bidder. Then we can start negotiations with them on what we can and can’t do we don’t have to go through the whole bidding process.”
Nichols added bids will begin on Sept. 16 and go through Oct. 26, so the council will hear about the bids at the Nov. 16 meeting.
Reach Katelin Gandee at kgandee@laurinburgexch.wpenginepowered.com.