(Audubon) A contract for the Highway F32 project in Audubon County was awarded this week.
An agreement was reached with Henningsen Construction for $5.144 Million. “It has a late start date of July 10th. It’s 80 working days. They postponed the M66 project last year north of Kimballton. I think there are four miles getting re-done there. It was supposed to have been done last fall, but it just got too late and too cold. So that project was delayed until spring. We hope to have them get started in the next month.”
Supervisors Chairman Doug Sorensen is hopeful they’ll do the two projects back-to-back and be done well before harvest. In order to pay for this project the county is in the process of bonding for $6 Million. There was previous discussion about including the Motorola Communication Tower in a bond of around $9 Million, but that’s unlikely to happen. “We were told we could pay that off at any time which is partly true, but we have to pay it off on an anniversary date which is December 1st. That kind of puts us into a muck because we cannot take that money for the payoff more than 90 days before the actually opportunity to pay it off. We can go ahead and pay Motorola the payoff amount, but we’d be basically paying the interest for seven months twice. That would amount to around $70,000,000 or 2.5 years worth of what we are going to save. So I think we are going to have to hold off on that.”
The supervisors are exploring another bond on the HVAC replacement project at the court house which recently received no bids. They expect to have a more firm number on what that will cost when they get ready to re-bid the project in the fall.
