After only receiving one bid for the city’s project to put up fencing and a new sidewalk for the expanded Elk Street Park, the Gloversville Common Council has decided to break the project into two parts.
Mayor Vince DeSantis told the Common Council at it’s June 14 meeting that only one bid with a price quote of $99,000 had come back for the Elk Street project’s competitive bidding process.
“Which is about three to four times what we expected it to be,” he said.
DeSantis said he believes the reason the bid was higher than expected was because the city had included all of the different parts of the project, including the masonry work for a new sidewalk, land grading for the three parcels the city has combined to enlarge the park, and the installation of approximately 200-feet of four-foot black aluminum fencing with one eight-foot tall gate and one five-foot tall gate built to seal-off the paved pathway between the parcels the city uses for Department of Public Works vehicles. The project will effectively extend the size of the park all the way to Washington Street, thanks to the city acquiring three adjacent parcels to the original Elk Street Park.
“With your permission, I would like to reject that bid,” DeSantis told the council on June 14. “And what we thought we would do is just go out to bid for the fence and the grading, only, and then, perhaps, go out to bid for the sidewalk separately. Because there are so many contractors that do fencing, and there are a lot of mason contractors as well, but, probably, there were very few that would do both, and that’s probably why we only got one bid, so I think with this strategy we’ll see what we can get.”
City Clerk Jenni Mazur said the $99,000 bid for the total project was submitted by Adamo Infra LLC, out of Albany.
Third Ward Councilwoman Betsy Batchelor, who had sponsored the original resolution for the Elk Street bidding process, questioned why the land grading wasn’t grouped with the masonry for the new sidewalk, rather than with the fencing.
“Do fencing and grading go together as well?” she asked.
“Yeah, I would think that grading would go with any kind of construction,” DeSantis said.
“I would think it would go more with sidewalk …,” Batchelor said.
“Well, what has to be graded is not where the sidewalk is, the sidewalk is right along the curb, so …,” DeSantis replied.
“I know. It’s the big hill,” Batchelor said, explaining her knowledge of Elk Street Park, which is located in her ward.
Sixth Ward Councilman Wrandy Siarkowski sponsored the council motion to reject the bid from Adamo Infra LLC and to start a new competitive bidding process for the two components of the process.
When the project was first revealed to the public in May, Batchelor explained the cost of the work would be paid from the $250,000 Environmental Justice Fund portion of Gloversville’s $1.5 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding. She said the plan for the park is to build a “Tot lot” similar to the park created by the city Recreation Commission on Spring Street.
In May, Mazur said the Recreation Commission raised about $8,000 plus a $500 donation in 2021 that it plans to combine and use to purchase age-appropriate playground equipment to be placed on the city-owned lot that is being used for the Washington Street expansion of Elk Street Park.
DeSantis said he expects it will take about three weeks to solicit new bids for the two different parts of the Elk Street project, so the city expects it will probably have new price quotes by the first week of July.
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