Project manager looks forward to competitive bidding process for firehouse

The bidding environment looks to be in a good place as the new fire station project gets closer to procuring a general contractor and subcontractors.

Monday night’s Firehouse Building Committee meeting featured an update on current work at the site and potential interior and exterior materials as well as a video rendering of the proposed building at the site of the old middle school.

Town Council President Jim Letterie said there will be another presentation of the architectural video rendering of the new fire station at the next council meeting on Tuesday, March 10.

“We’re still hauling out debris and we will be hauling out debris for another week,” said owner’s project manager Dan Pallotta. “There are still a few walls left to come out, some of them have some mastic on that we are working on, other than that, we are looking pretty good.”

Initial results from test pits of the soil on the site have also been positive so far, Pallotta said.

The final results from the test pits will help guide the construction of the new foundations of the fire station, he added.

“It’s actually really an important step for us because the biggest cost we are going to encounter is the foundation,” said Pallotta. “It is the only unknown we have left. As soon as we get that unknown under our belt, I can sleep like a baby.”

The last week of March, Pallotta said the project team is going to begin working with Town Manager Tony Marino to start the process of pre-qualifying contractors.

“This being a project that is greater than $10 million, we have to pre-qualify all the filed subcontractors and the general contractors to allow them to bid,” said Pallotta.

There are 16 trades that are considered filed subbidders, and Pallotta said there are about a dozen of them that will be involved with the fire station project.

That process will involve four people, including a representative of the owner’s project manager, a representative of the designer, and two representatives from the town.

Pallotta and Letterie both noted that there has been positive news with an active bidding market for other local and regional projects.

“The bidding climate right now is really good,” said Pallotta. “We just prequalified the Hingham Senior Center; we got 11 potential bidders for every single trade and we got 14 generals. That was a huge number; we haven’t seen that since 2003.

“It’s clear that the competition is out there right now.”

Currently, the schedule is to begin the actual bidding process at the end of June, Pallotta said.

“The faster we get to that line, the better I think our number is going to be,” he said.