Onsite Insite

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Dec. 20, 2002

Wait ’til next year

This morning before Christmas Eve and Day is pretty quiet on the bidding front, but the New Year shows early promise:

• Long lead trade bids for the makeover of Camp Randall, University of Wisconsin-Madison, including steel, precast, permanent power and elevators will be due in early January. The whole price tag, now formally approved, is estimated at $72.5 million. A joint venture of J.P. Cullen & Sons, Janesville, and C.D. Smith, Fond du Lac, will be the construction management team on the project.
• Although actual construction won’t begin until later in the year, you can expect early 2003 action on the $75 million expansion of the Abbey Resorts in Fontana, including new hotel/condo units and property rehab.
• UW’s Memorial Union lakefront (Lake Mendota) cafeteria will be bidding early in the year for renovation work worth an estimated $2.5 million. The State Building Commission nixed a single bid approach at its recent meeting.
• In West Allis, bids for structural and miscellaneous steel, design/build plumbing, fire protection, HVAC and electrical are already in and being evaluated for the first phase of a project to renovate some former Allis-Chalmers buildings at an estimated cost of $21 million, thus the beat goes on to further develop the vast properties of the late machinery manufacturer.
• Bids are due shortly on a $30 million expansion of the commuter terminal building at the Dane County Regional Airport.
• Also in Madison, bidding will continue on various pieces of the Overture Center project, including glass-fiber reinforced gypsum, food-service equipment, orchestra risers, miscellaneous metals and cast plaster. The total estimated tab for Overture, with J. H. Findorff & Son as construction manager, is estimated at $100 million.
• Appleton’s getting a new boutique hotel, Copper Leaf, estimated at $9 million, and bids are due in several subtrade divisions on Jan. 9 with another bid package slated for later in the month. Hoffman Corporation, Greenville, is the design/build construction manager.
• Freddy Storm, in his earlier life, was a general contractor and then turned to some modest real estate/development activity. One of Freddy’s prize projects was a golf property (make that driving range) on West Bluemound Road, Brookfield. Now it’s slated to become the Fountain Square shopping complex featuring a 90,000-square-foot Expo Design Center, a division of Home Depot. The Storm golf property will be moved to the rear (north end) of the property and renamed Storms’ Golf Training Center.

Well, you get the idea — there’s work ahead despite the sluggish economy.

Seven entries in Wells Street Entry job

Frankly, we are at a loss to explain our predilection for chronicling the progress of a project to renovate the Wells Street entry to the Milwaukee Public Library. Last fall, we told you the single bid for the work by Guenther-Wagner-Johnson, West Allis, was rejected by the bookies. More recently, we revealed the project was being rebid and due on Jan. 14 and that the original bidder had been joined by Platt, Franklin. We opined there would probably be more generals in the hunt by bid time.

Now, the number of bidders has swollen to seven: G-W-J; Platt; William Sackerson, Cudahy; J.P. Cullen, Brookfield; Thomas & Egenhoefer, Menomonee Falls; J.A. Campbell, Brookfield; and Reichl, Hales Corners. We don’t have the foggiest as to what turned this project into something more desirable, attracting the magnificent seven, turning it into an auction, per se. But so be it!Slow bidding, SOTW honors easy pick You might characterize last week’s bidding as sluggish, albeit we don’t have final numbers on two projects bid Dec. 18. But, nonetheless, no one probably matched those of Environmental Systems, Waukesha, and Butters-Fetting, Milwaukee, who came up with the identical number, $99,500, to install 104 air conditioners for a West Allis senior housing project. Runner-up was Merrill Gravel and Construction, Merrill, with its $1,230 or 0.5 percent underbid of Josart Bros., De Pere, to make roadway and utility improvements in Amherst, Portage County. The two bids were $233,624 and $234,854. You won’t be enjoying Onsite/Insite again until next year. We are resting the orbs by simply going away for a couple of weeks. Besides, there’s not much happening on the bid track to report in the interim. A happy and profitable New Year to all.