ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, January 11, 1997 TAG: 9701130031
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: RADFORD
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
New state rules are causing another delay in the construction of the New River Valley Regional Jail.
The eight localities making up the Regional Jail Authority plan to use a procedure called construction management to build the jail in the Dublin Industrial Park.
A construction manager works with potential subcontractors in the design phase of a project and would provide the authority with a guaranteed maximum cost about halfway through the process of working drawings. This speeds construction and controls costs.
But the state Design-Build/Construction Management Review Board, created by the 1996 General Assembly, has rejected the regional jail project because it did not conform with state construction management procedures.
The trouble is that the newborn state agency has no procedures. Its members have been appointed just recently, and the regional jail project is the first to come before it.
In turning down the project, the review board included a recommendation that the regional jail authority present the project again with new procedures.
"They're turning thumbs down on a project because we haven't followed a process they haven't even defined," said Assistant Radford City Manager Bob Lloyd, authority chairman.
"In essence, what we're doing is writing their rules for them in this process," Lloyd told other authority members here Friday. "This will entail beginning at the beginning and going through this whole process again."
A long delay could end up increasing the jail cost by thousands or even millions of dollars, because of rising construction costs, interest rates on money borrowed and other factors. The state is paying 50 percent of the jail construction cost.
The major problem with the process followed by the authority was a failure to get approval from the state review board before sending out requests for proposals from construction management firms.
But the review board had not been formed when the authority sent out those proposals. There was no way to get its approval.
Some authority members suggested reminding the review board of that. Lloyd said he made that argument twice without success when he and Jack Murphy, with the Thompson and Litton engineering firm, met with the board recently at one of its first meetings.
Lloyd said construction management procedures must conform with five sections of the state code, and the authority's attorney is working toward a procedure to do that. Lloyd showed a preliminary chart of a complicated-looking procedure that may fit all the requirements.
He said the board members are for the jail project going with construction management. "Everybody is in favor of it ... I think they're on our side," he said. "The problem is they haven't got any procedures, and we haven't followed a procedure they can accept ... My impression is that, if we identify a process that meets all the provisions of the code, they would approve it very quickly."
The situation could have been worse. The board's original motion was to table the matter for six months, which would have been costly. The substitute motion to disapprove the project was actually better because it gives the authority a chance to come back quickly with a revised procedure and waste as little time as possible.
"Time is the important element in this case, and it's more important to us than it is to them," Lloyd said.
The jail, when completed, will serve the counties of Pulaski, Giles, Floyd, Wythe, Bland, Grayson and Carroll and the city of Radford.
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