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IVCCD approves bid for residence hall

Graphic Courtesy of OPN Architects — The new Ellsworth Community College residence hall planned by the Iowa Valley Community College District to be constructed by the end of fall 2022.

Iowa Valley Community College District approved a $6.7 million bid for the construction of a new residence hall.

With an anticipated gross area spanning approximately 27,735 square feet, the 127-bed residence hall designed by OPN Architects is to be constructed at the Ellsworth Community College campus in Iowa Falls. It will include new dorm residence rooms, study spaces and a computer lab. The bid comes from Steege Construction in Waverly.

The IVCCD Board of Directors had to navigate a volatile bidding market to price the project at a desirable cost.

Project Architect from OPN Architects Joe Feldmann who is working with IVCCD on the bidding process, said during a special meeting to accept the bid Monday night, the final construction costs fell within their planned range but feels the cost could have been lower.

“We felt that we should have been still closer to the $6.4 million to $6.5 million number as a low number, that was our target goal,” Feldmann said. “It’s still quite volatile.”

T-R Photo by Trevor Babcock — Iowa Valley Community College District Board of Directors voted to accept a bid for the construction of a new Ellsworth Community College residence hall.

IVCCD Chancellor Kristie Fisher said when the district originally planned several construction projects including the new dorm at Ellsworth, they believed they were entering a healthy bidding environment.

“The pandemic kind of threw that out the door,” Fisher said.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused both the price of labor and construction materials such as carpet, tile and lumber to rise to uncommonly high numbers. She said on any given day, they didn’t know what supply chain would be interrupted or what the labor market would look like.

“What we did was we went back to all of our numbers and looked at it again and built in what we call bid day insurance,” Fisher said. “We wanted to make sure we were estimating extremely high, so we can come in within the range which is what we did here.”

She said what’s exciting about the project is the district originally looked at renovating a legacy dorm, but were able to instead build an entirely new structure.

“When the architects looked at it, they said for just a little bit more we could build a new one and the energy efficiency is going to be tremendous,” Fisher said. “The accessibility is going to be so much better and it’s going to be more conducive for students to live there.”

Construction on the new residence hall is anticipated to start next week, with a completion date expected to be before fall of 2022.

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Contact Trevor Babcock at 641-753-6611 or tbabcock@timesrepublican.com.

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