County judge ready to shift focus after jail opens

A news release County Judge Rick Davis issued Sunday signaled the end of his direct involvement with the new Garland County Detention Center, the 168,000-square foot facility the Garland County Sheriff's Department said housed all detainees in county custody as of June 19.

The release said Davis' role diminished after construction of the building reached substantial completion May 19, the date Davis said triggers the warranty period on work performed by the approximately 30 contractors involved with the $42 million project.

"As official custodian of all county buildings and property, I'll always be somewhat involved with the building," Davis said in the release. "But I was more than happy to turn over operations to the sheriff.

" ... I'm ready to take a back seat role in the detention center project and move on to focus on other needs challenging the county. Garland County now has a state-of-the-art, quality facility to assist in everyone's goal of keeping Garland County safe."

The release also defended the omission of contractual language compelling contractors to complete work on time.

"I've taken a lot of heat for not including penalty provisions for falling behind the original schedule," he said in the release. "But I stand by that decision. My years of experience with construction projects is that contractors bidding work will just calculate the penalty provision amounts into the bid, and you end up paying more for the end product.

"I think the route we chose allowed us to get more bang for the buck with taxpayer dollars, which was our goal in the very beginning."

Davis said Monday that bidding out the contracts directly instead of using a general contractor helped keep the project under budget. A current balance of remaining contingency money was unavailable Monday, but most of it was used to add a $1.5 million courtroom to the design plans.

Davis said the general-contractor model allows multiple markups to attach to change orders as they progress through the process and inflates the cost of revisions to the original design.

"I think we've alleviated that from happening, and in the long run saved money," he said.

The release said the project has entered the closeout phase.

"It's more or less the paperwork side of things, making sure the contractors have paid their subcontractors and vendors and things like that," Davis said Monday.

Contract amounts withheld to ensure proper work will be released after the county receives that paperwork, Davis said.

The news release concludes with the expectation that the construction bonds financing the project will be retired by next year, ending collection of the five-eighths cent sales tax voters passed in 2011 to build the detention center.

Simmons First Trust Co., the trustee hired by the county to disburse sales-tax collections to bond holders, projected earlier this year that surplus revenue will retire the bonds by March 2017, two years before the longest-maturing bonds reach the end of their terms.

The official statement detailing the bond issue's debt service requirements and maturity schedule calculates $5 million in interest payments accruing on the $41.2 million bond issue, but the projection doesn't account for a reduced interest obligation caused by bonds being paid off earlier than expected.

The resulting drop in the principal will reduce interest payments projected in the official statement.

Local on 06/30/2015

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