Two wildly different bids for the Winamac Town Park restroom project were opened by the park board Thursday. The FORM-IT Corporation submitted a bid of $165,000. Gariup Construction Company’s bid was more than twice that, at $347,500.
Plans call for the old brick restrooms to be demolished and replaced with a new structure, with more ADA-compliant stalls and more room in general. The project’s budget was about $264,000, according to Park Board President Chris Schramm, with half of that to be covered by a Land and Water Conservation Fund grant. Board members agreed to let Town Attorney Justin Schramm review the bids before making a decision.
Chris Schramm added that the grant paperwork has been finalized. “I got the final signed copies back from the DNR,” he said. “Everything’s good. I gave them to the town clerk. She has those, the full copies of all the contracts and everything.”
But board member and town manager Brad Zellers noted that all of the state permits need to be resubmitted, while one simply has to be renewed, due to the amount of time the project has taken. The work was first bid out over a year ago, but the park board ended up rejecting the first round of bids when the lowest bidder pulled out. Then, the grant funding took longer than expected to come through, due, in part, to the federal government shutdown.