Faith Morrison

GRAHAM JAEHNIG

HOUGHTON – The Houghton County Jail Committee has formalized what it refers to as an Industry Day. The committee will host the event from 5-7 p.m. on Wednesday, July 15 at the Franklin Township Firehall.

The open forum will serve as an initiative to gather Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) cost estimates from local construction and design-build firms and interested local contractors and architectural firms to collaborate on a proposed county jail facility. It will serve as a marketplace research tool to gather fast, reliable cost estimates before upcoming ballot deadlines.

During a Monday meeting of the Committee, committee member Faith Morrison said one of the focuses of the meeting needs to be a discussion of how design-build differs from traditional build-bid-build.

“There are materials online that we could read to learn about it,” she said, “but it would be good to hear from our contractors about it.”

Morrison said while reading information on design-build, she discovered a lot of discussion regarding risk.

She said with a progressive design-build, the project is not fully defined at the beginning progresses in an orderly manner toward finalizing a design.

“I can be assumed that you can do the site preparation for the sewage and electrical and stuff,” she said. “The risk is that you would suddenly think of something that had to be done that would require a different plan than what you were going with in those early steps.”

These types of risks, said Morrison, are the types of information the committee hopes to gather from interested contractors.

In planning the Industry Day, Morrison said she drafted the agenda based on what the committee and County Board members would need to take from the public meeting.

“What we’re really talking about is how to structure the meeting,” she said. “I’m sort of answering that by saying these are the kinds of things, at least I think, would be a useful use of our time and the contractor’s time.”

A July 29 potential deadline for contractors to submit ROMs was suggested but not finalized. A July deadline, said Morrison, would afford the County Board sufficient time to review the documents before having to draft the language to place a millage request on the November ballot.

through the Industry Day event,the committee hopes contractors can produce an ROM (Rough Order of Magnitude Cost) for constructing a facility on the Sharon Avenue property which will accommodate from 60-70 inmates and also contain sufficient spaces for serving that number of inmates, as well as a Sheriff’s office, and support offices. The current jail would be converted to evidence storage and county records files storage.