BIDS FOR NEW ANIMAL SHELTER WAY OVER BUDGET
Brenham’s new animal shelter and adoption center construction bids came in higher than architectural estimates, which will now involve the project to be reevaluated.
Brenham Police Chief Rex Phelps say that the four bids received were “significantly higher than expected” and that the city has $2 million for the project, with half of that coming from private sources.
Phelps had this to say about the future of the project.
Phelps says the first step will be to go through value engineering to try to get the project to a lower overall cost. Phelps says that is it not unusual for public projects to be higher than hoped for bids, but these bids came out much higher than expected.
Putting more money into the project isn’t really an option, says Phelps, and that ideally, it would be better to get the project cost down to a point where the city or community do not need to be approached for more money.
The shelter cannot be put on hold indefinitely due to the project having higher costs in the future, and also because the current shelter is not serviceable. It has serious structural problems and is currently inadequate for today's needs, according to city officials.
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Really 2 million for an animal shelter but not for a fire station. Come on a fire station can protect the citizens but an animal shelter can’t.
Animal Hilton! Come on to County Residents point the VFD’s build nice facilities with very small budgets.
I am all for a new animal shelter, but $2,000,000? Sure seems that our elected officials have champagne taste on a beer budget. Maybe they should collaborate with the county fire depts; they seem to build new stations on little or no money.
Value, you say…… Sounds like a great project for small animal vet and engineering schools at a&m to collaborate on
$2,000,000 for an animal shelter??? That certainly seems excessive! I support having a quality animal shelter and have adopted a pet which I love very much from there, but $2,000,000. I have to think that it can be done at a more reasonable cost than that.