Jul. 13—The Oneonta Common Council's finance committee decided Thursday, July 13 to bring to the full council a potential alternative to a public bid on the demolition of a derelict downtown building.
The city is *considering participating in cooperative purchasing, or contractor-led pricing, in the demolition project of the former Oneonta Sales Company building at the corner of Market Street and Chestnut Street Extension.
The city purchased the building in 2020 from a private owner for $425,000. The 29,574 square-foot building is a former car dealership that sat vacant for years.
The plan is to demolish the building and clean up the site using a $477,915 grant from the Restore New York Communities Initiative Program, which was awarded in 2018 and was set to expire in 2020, however city Finance Director Virginia Lee said Thursday that the city still had the funds.
A traditional design-bid-build project is designed by engineers and then bid on by contractors.
In cooperative purchasing, the contractors that would perform the work creating a team that works off of the ideas generated by the engineers to come up with a scope of work.
The co-op team then would help city officials on pricing. This establishes construction costs early in the process.
Dave Ohman, Delaware Engineering principal, said to the committee that due to the complexity of the project, it would facilitate the involvement of some other people.
"It isn't simply a straightforward building demo," Ohman said. "You've got asbestos, you've got lead paint, and that wouldn't be so bad if you were just dealing with the first two floors, but the basement under about two thirds of the building is dark, gloomy, full of water. There's asbestos that's attached to the pipes in the water. It's a safety hazard."
He added that Chestnut Street Extension on one side and Water Street on the other side are "basically being retained now in a large sense by a portion of the building that we're going to demo."
Gorick Construction is the contractor. Binghamton-based Essential Constructs competitively bid the cooperative.
Once the project is put together, Essential Constructs submits it to a third party called TIPS to price it versus the national average, acting as a third-party check.
The cooperative would not only be used for the demolition project, but the city would have an opportunity to use the same cooperative for HVAC upgrades in the Public Safety building.
If the council approves the use of a cooperative, the city would still need the state Empire State Development Corporation's approval to use a cooperative for the demolition. The city would not need its approval for the cooperative to use it for public safety building.