Commissioners approve school change order
By Steve Herring
Published in News on April 23, 2015 1:46 PM
Wayne County commissioners approved nearly $160,000 Tuesday to begin construction of wet wells at the new Spring Creek and Grantham middle school sites.
A wet well is a holding area for gravity-flow sewer systems. When a certain level is reached, the sewage is pumped to a forced main, or lifted to a higher grade to continue the gravity flow.
The wells would normally come later in the project, but there is a need to do them earlier, County Manager George Wood told commissioners.
"The reason they need the wet wells in is that they will already be testing their HVAC system, and they have to have some place to discharge that condensation," Wood said. "What we have agreed to, if you are in agreement, is to have Metcon do construction on those through a change order.
"That way we can save time and money as far as waiting to bid those out."
Metcon/T.A. Loving Co. is the construction team building the two new schools.
Metcon talked with subcontractors to get the prices.
Engineer Michael McAllister has looked at the prices and is "comfortable" with them, Wood said.
The Spring Creek cost will be $89,210, while Grantham's will be $68,775, for total of $157,985.
"As you recall the county is responsible for the water and sewer," Wood said. "So this will be paid by the county. (Chairman) Wayne (Aycock) and I have agreed with the school board that we would do all change orders on the schools project jointly. So the school board voted yesterday (Monday) to do this of course subject to your approval because this contract is actually your contract. They (school board) have the contract for school construction, but the contract for sewer would be on yours.
"What we suggesting is in order to save time that you add this as part of their construction contract with Metcon. The reason that Spring Creek is more, there is about $16,500 in there, we need to have a drop manhole there. That is a manhole where we basically have a drastic drop in elevation so it requires one additional manhole on that."
Wood said he was making the recommendation in order to move forward so not to lose more time.
"Because as you saw the other day (during a tour of Spring Creek) they are making very good progress," Wood said.
If it has to be done, it has to be done, Commissioner Bill Pate said.
But he questioned if it was something that been "expected" or had "just come up."
Wood said he had been working for probably a couple of months on the project and that it is something the county had known would be needed.
Getting the wet wells in now instead of later will help avoid any delays, he said.
"You were going to have to do it anyway," Wood said. "The wet wells are part of the pump station."
Commissioner Joe Daughtery asked for an update on any delays in putting in the sewer lines.
There has been some delay at Spring Creek because of dealing with the Southeastern Wayne Sanitary District where the sewer will be discharged, McAllister said.
At Grantham the delay has been in getting the extra land needed for the sewer, he said. Also, wet weather has held up progress there, he said.
Daughtery asked what the problem was at Spring Creek.
"They have added some things to the scope we did not anticipate doing, such as a building," McAllister said. "They added paved driveways. The reason for the drop manhole is in the last comments we got back from the (school) district, they wanted a trash basket put inside the wet well.
"The way we had originally designed it, we had the schools' stubout going into one elevation and then the stub the district wanted which was (actually) six feet lower. So in order to accommodate the basket, we had to put the drop manhole in there."
Each wet well will store about 10,000 gallons, he said.
Daughtery said the county wanted the utilities in place to ensure the schools were ready to open in August.
In another school board matter, commissioners approved a request to transfer free of charge school property to the University of Mount Olive.
The school board would first deed the property to the county that would in turn deed it to the university.
The property is 0.4 acres and was previously used in connection with agriculture program at the old Mount Olive High School. It is located behind the old school building that now houses university apartments, its music department and assembly hall.
Wood said that over the past 10 years that the university has allowed the school system to use its facilities free of charge on numerous occasions.
The value of that use is $48,850, based on fees the university normally charges, he said.