Dougherty County School Board awards Monroe High project to JCI Construction out of Moultrie

ALBANY — The Dougherty County School Board on Monday voted 7-0 to award JCI Contractors of Moultrie the $35 million contract for construction management at risk services on the Phase II renovation and construction project at Monroe High School.

JCI was chosen from a pool of eight different firms which submitted RFQ (request for qualifications) on the project. Three of the eight firms had Albany connections, including Hogan Construction group of Atlanta which had partnered with the Albany firm of Dukes, Edwards and Dukes, Allstate Construction of Tucker which partnered with the Albany firm of James Unlimited, and LRA Constructors which was a joint venture with with Artesian Construction.

LRA and Artesian were the only wholly-based firms to submit a RFQ, a fact that LRA President Ben Barrow pointed out to the school board before the vote to award the contract.

“I want to make it clear that I am not denigrating any other firm that submitted an RFQ on this project, but it is hard for us to understand the board’s definition of local participation and joint ventures,” Barrow said. “I admit we don’t have a lot of experience in K-12 school work, but we have completed more than 2,500 commercial projects in the region. There is no sense in sending a $28 million job down the road to out of town contractors. We pay more than $350,000 in property taxes every year in Dougherty County.

“The profit dollars from this project will leave town and not benefit Albany because we’ll be sending the majority of that money someplace else.”

JCI’s fee for managing the project will be close to $3 million. The remaining $32 million will be awarded to subcontractors for work such as framing, structural steel, electrical, plumbing and other work.

Barrow said at this time his company would not bid on any of the subcontracted projects.

“Let me ask you this, would you want to do a job working for a competitor?” Barrow said. “Right now our intent is not to bid on any of those packages. We hold no animosity towards anyone, we live here, we love this community and give back to it. We just don’t understand why those profit dollars will be leaving this community.”

DCSS finance Director Ken Dyer pointed out that JCI has a solid record of K-12 construction and is designated as a local company in the state defined 14-county Region 10, of which also includes Dougherty County. He added the company specializes in building schools and the DCSS has an agreement in place with JCI to maximize local participation in the awarding of the subcontracts.

“We intend to maximize all the local business who are eligible to participate in this project,” Dyer said. “We are providing the opportunity for this to take place and we will be monitoring local participation very closely.”

The system plans to complete the project in two phases. The first phase will begin in the summer of 2016 and is not expected to displace students. The entire project is expected to take between 24 and 30 months to complete.