Commissioners Award Tower Construction Contract

by Jonathan Weaver

The county’s radio update continues to be in tune with county leaders.

County commissioners awarded a $2.7 million construction contract Thursday afternoon at their public meeting to allow for the new towers and ground work.

Bids were received from Sabre Towers and Poles of Sioux City, Iowa and JG Contracting of Carnegie, Pa. March 3.

County Public Safety Director Randall Brozenick announced his recommendation.

“After reviewing the two bids, and backed on the recommendation of our consultants, with extensive review and adding things to the contract that were optional items to get as close to the amount that we need, we’ve come with the suggestion to award the bid to JG Contracting for a not-to-exceed amount of $2,782,577.96.”

In those two weeks, Brozenick found the $9.3 million bid from Sabre Towers and the $5.4 million bid from JG Contracting were combined bid totals to provide site construction for both Armstrong and Indiana County radio towers.

The two counties are both reviewing the same contractors in hopes of saving some money during the mandated updates.

Once costs were broken-down, public safety officials came up with the local cost of $2.7 million.

Work on Armstrong County radio towers would have cost $4.5 million if Sabre Towers and Poles was awarded the contract.

There are 15 radio tower sites used by the county - one of which, the SENEX site, located across the county line in Indiana County. That tower has not yet been constructed.

Construction for that tower will be shared between both county governments.

Indiana County Commissioners will award a contractor for their project later this month.

L.R. Kimball Senior Lead Project Manager and County Consultant John Cunnington, Jr. said a lot of time was spent reviewing the proposals.

“We spent significant time determining the JG Contracting bid met all the minimum requirements within the RFP (Request for Proposal) and at the not-to-exceed price, the work can be done.”

Co-Owners John and Jim Gyurina are principle contractors for JG Contracting and attended the meeting Thursday afternoon in anticipation.

Both said they appreciate being able to work close-to-home and many workers who reside in Armstrong and Indiana County will work on the project. The project is estimated to take 6-18 months to complete.

“It’s a home-grown thing – we’re hopeful to keep these guys employed for a little while here on this project,” John said.

County leaders will dictate when construction will begin, but the contractors hope to complete project design and start working in the next few months.

Brozenick said all the pieces are in place to begin the project after meeting with site land owners.

“It’s going to be a lot of work, but we gotta get it done,” Brozenick said.

John said positive leadership within the county government has helped advance the project.

“There’s been a lot of cooperation with everybody involved and it seems like this is a project everybody wants. In those instances, thing seem to happen fast because there’s a lot of goodwill, a lot of good coordination.

“I see a lot of smiles in here, and it’s good to see that,” John said.

Contractors will work with several county entities during the process, but also will work with Motorola, Inc. – the county’s radio and paging vendor – to make sure all radio equipment is properly installed. John explained the telecommunication role.

“Once we build the towers and install the buildings and all the generators, we call the infrastructure for the site – Motorola – come by, put all their radio equipment inside the buildings and put antennas up on the towers,” John said.

Commissioner James Scahill said the radio contract was a big step forward for the local company.

“That’s a major contract and a major first step of the radio system in terms of getting your ‘boots-on-the-ground’ and getting things built,” Scahill said. “And it is good that we had someone from Pennsylvania win the contract.”

Cunnington, Jr. said he is anxious for the project to finally begin.

“I’m more excited than relieved. This is the first key element of getting the radio network up – we have to build the infrastructure,” Cunnington, Jr. said. “We’re going to work now.”

In conjunction with the radio project, the commissioners also approved Schrader Group Architecture, LLC, to construct the new Emergency Operations Center.

The operations center was put out for bid several months ago, but not awarded because public safety officials were awaiting the return of a grant contract with the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.

The state agency agreed to finance half of the project - $1 million – in December.

The county will pay an additional $1 million for the center unless more grant funding is found by county planners.

Brozenick explained the decision to choose Schrader Group Architecture out of a possible dozen bidders.

“Schrader was picked mostly because of their past experience of building emergency operation centers,” Brozenick said. “When you build an emergency operations center, it’s not just like building a regular building – there’s a lot of redundancy that has to be done, so when you go through all your emergencies or lose power, we have to make sure (the emergency operations center) keeps running.”

County Planning and Development Assistant Director Carmen Johnson was also approved to be the contact between the state agency and the county planners.