After months of planning, the Iowa Valley Community College District Board of Directors approved two bids for repair work at the Reg Johnson classroom building at Ellsworth Community College in Iowa Falls.

The bid amounts totaled more than $300,000, and one of the projects came in significantly higher than officials at design firm TSP Inc. had predicted. That project is for HVAC replacement and upgrades at Reg Johnson.

“On this project, we only require one bid, and that was from Reliable 1 out of Iowa Falls,” TSP architect Justin Sorensen said. “Here, the bid came in over our budget, our estimate. Looking back and analyzing why that happened, the budget number that we were using was from 2017. We didn’t really take into account any inflation going into when we were bidding it in the first place.”

Specifically, the bid approved for the HVAC project Wednesday was $187,782, more than a third higher than TSP’s original estimate. While the bid was approved, the vote was not unanimous, with board members Chris Brodin and Delbert Kellogg voting against the measure.

“That’s a lot of dollars,” Kellogg said.

Brodin asked Sorensen if the firm had considered going back out for another round of bidding on the project to try and get better pricing and competition. Sorensen said they did not because of the time schedule to get the work done.

He said not only would going back out for bid delay the project, but doing so would also risk an even higher cost due to regular inflation.

The other bid approved Wednesday was for masonry cleaning, repair and tuckpointing at Reg Johnson by MTS Consulting LLC in the amount of $120,500.

Reg Johnson Hall is home to Ellsworth Community College’s business, computer science, merchandising and retail marketing, apparel merchandising, social science, psychology and office careers programs and offices.

It also includes classrooms, computer labs and Buena Vista University offices.

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Contact Adam Sodders at

(641) 753-6611 or

asodders@timesrepublican.com