By GRAHAM JAEHNIG

gjaehnig@mininggazette.com

HOUGHTON – Among primary concerns for a new county jail, residents have expressed concerns over costs. Estimates range from $24-36 million.

At a special meeting of the Board of Commissioners Tuesday morning, engineering consultants with Abonmarche Byce Securitecture provided a PowerPoint presentation to the County Board of Commissioners on conceptual designs for a new jail facility that has been termed the Houghton County Justice Center.

Bret Dodd, consultant with the Benton Harbor, Michigan-based engineering and consulting firm, told the Board and public attendees that at this point in the project, a jail is still in the conceptual stages.

“We’re dealing with master planning kinds of things right now,” Dodd said. “How big is it? How much is it going to cost?”

Dodd said at this point, no design has been completed. There is no detailed design necessary for construction contract bids at this point.

This phase of the project, Dodd said, employed a six-step process of approach and methodology that progressively evolves information to get to a point where the decision makers can decide what direction they want to go with the project.

Step One was to set the rules for the project, such as policies, procedures, interactions with other team members, deadlines and scope of work. Steps two through four involve the information from strategic planning to conceptual design, while steps 5-6 reconciling the cost of the project with what is affordable; Step 6 encompasses preliminary design.

“All of our costs are based on historic data, square-foot data, escalated and with inflationary factors to 2026, the start date of construction,” Dodd said. “We take our 40-some odd years of historic data that is the most relevant, we adjust it, escalate it, then put into terms of what it might cost in the future.”

So, no building design has been done yet, he said.

“The preliminary design will give you an opportunity to look at the detail of it. So, for instance, you can actually draw up the building detail and put in all the windows and doors, wall types and everything else, a line of take-offs. Then, you can do a much more sophisticated estimate rather than just the square-foot cost estimate data that we have.”

The last two steps are variables and may or may not be used for this particular phase of the project, said Dodd.