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09/19/2007: "Council Gets The Official Tour & Opens Some Bids"

(County Council views construction progress of new Council meeting room)

County Administrator Pete Rose set up a “County Council Construction and Renovation Tour” for the council members and council staff on Tuesday.

The walking tour included the courthouse, the courthouse annex building, and then a quick look at their future home in the new “Legislative Building”. The County purchased the building last year (formerly called the Carlson Building, and we expect the locals will continue to call it that for at least the next twenty years) and will be moving their offices and administrative staff into it.

The tour was scheduled to start at 10:15 and end in time for lunch at noon, but as the council made the rounds of the departments, some of the department heads saw a rare opportunity for show-and-tell of their space and budget needs, so by the time noon had rolled around the tour had only completed a tour of the courthouse.





By the time the group arrived for an inspection of the Legislative Building, only Councilmen Knapp, Ranker and Rosenfeld were still attendance, having lost Councilman Lichter to a scheduled noon meeting, and Myhr & Peterson are on vacation.

While the new Council meeting room is only rough framed, the attending council members seemed to be a little under whelmed with the overall size and the low ceilings, but Administrative Services Director Dave Zeretzke pointed out that the room will hold about the same number of people as the current meeting room, and that the lower ceilings will enhance the acoustics of the room.

Coincidental to the tour, the Council opened bids after the tour for new telecommunication and audio visual equipment for the new meeting room. The high bid from Commercial Sound, Inc. of Seattle was $103,648.38, and a low bid from Dimensional Communications, Inc. of Mt Vernon was for $70,186.

Information Services Manager George Johnson said that the lower bid was well within the costs projected during the planning process, and Zeretzke called both bidders “extremely well qualified, top notch firms.”

There was also a supplementary item: a video switching system; and in these bids the low and high were reversed, with Commercial Sound, inc bid slightly more than $21,000, while Dimensional Communications, inc bid was: $14,295.

No action was taken on the bids, but it is expected the council will vote to award the contract next week to the low bidder: