Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
A contract may be within a week of being set for the new Colfax School District track.
As summer nears, following the rejection of the lone bid it received for the resurfacing and other work, the district now seeks a contract agreement with Beynon Sports Surfaces, naming Palouse River Rock of Colfax and Motley and Motley as subcontractors.
Beynon, an international company, is on the roster of the King County Directors' Association (KCDA) – like a small works roster for statewide members of the cooperative, which Colfax is part of.
“That general contractor fee is the only thing waffling out there,” Colfax Superintendent Jerry Pugh said of working toward an agreement to begin track work in June.
Pugh discussed the matter with the school board in a work session Monday, May 23. The board had previously rejected a $318,000 bid from Palouse River Rock earlier this month as being too high.
“This has caused us to say, 'this is where we're at, we have to make some changes,'” said Pugh.
Noting he met with a representative of the City of Colfax earlier in the day, he listed changes that will likely be made to the Schmuck Park restrooms – a joint project with the city – as well as the track.
A small room for light controls for the football field and track would be nixed from the restroom plan. Second, work on the infield of the track (high jump, long-jump areas) would be cut along with asphalt planned for around the bathroom complex.
“You can see that the numbers are beginning to work for us,” Pugh told the board.
A discussion followed with board members about the cracks in the current surface of the track.
“Our first commitment is to resurface that track,” Pugh said. “That is it.”
He relayed to the board that the high cost of the original bid – which caught Pugh, the board and its architect by surprise – is related to higher cost for a big project like this at a rural school.
The new option of going through the KCDA would not require a bid sequence.
Otherwise, the district would need to start another two-week process to go out for formal bids.
“The price just keeps going up the longer we wait,” Pugh said.
In the original $318,000 bid from Palouse River Rock, Beynon was set to lay the new track surface, acting as a subcontractor. The district – and its architects on the project, Architects West of Coeur d'Alene – had gone out to bid in March for the track work, which includes partial demolition, laying a new base, compacting it and creating a two-inch lift to the new surface.
While the track is the first order of business on the Colfax athletic complex, the restrooms – serving Schmuck Park as well – are a close second, set for construction later this summer.
Pugh and Mark Brown, Colfax schools' maintenance director, went on a site visit to Spokane Tuesday to look at restrooms built by CTX Infrastructure of Spokane Valley.
The restroom complex and the track work are slated to be paid for by a combination of state and county grants, school district funds and private donations.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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