GREENFIELD — The City of Greenfield received an unusually high number of bids for the planned construction of a new Greenfield-Hancock County Animal Management Building, with nine companies expressing interest in the project.
Greenfield Mayor Chuck Fewell said he was glad to see the project attract such an unusual number of bidders.
“I was glad to see the bids so close together,” Fewell said, adding that the relatively limited range of the proposals likely means that each of them was responsible and well-researched.
The city council authorized spending up to $5.5 million on the project, but Fewell said the bids fell in the range of what he was expecting to see. Eight bids could be considered, with a ninth coming in after the deadline. All were in the $4.2-4.9 million range.
The apparent low bidder is F.H. Paschen, S.N. Nielsen and Associates, with a bid of $4,240,000. The low bid will be reviewed to ensure it meets with the city’s criteria before being accepted.
The bid will be awarded by the Greenfield Board of Works, but another, new entity will hold custody of the money used to pay for the project.
Greenfield will finance the project by using lease financing, which allows it to avoid exceeding the city’s debt limit. Instead of issuing a bond itself, the city creates a non-profit corporation, which then issues a bond to pay for the construction and is gradually reimbursed by the city.
To administer the project, the city has created a new City of Greenfield Building Corporation. The corporation will own the Animal Management building and the land where it is located until it is fully paid back by the city through a lease-to-purchase structure.
By the terms of the resolution passed by the city council, the annual lease for the building cannot exceed $442,000. The lease will be paid over a term of 20 years or less, depending on the final price of the project.
Steve Foreman of the Indiana Farm Bureau, Retta Livengood of the Greenfield Area Chamber of Commerce, and Amanda Everidge of the Hancock County Tourism Commission were appointed to serve as the directors of the building corporation.
The planned new space for animal management will be a 14,000-square-foot building with several features the previous location was missing. Those include a separate space where cats will be housed, space for prospective owners to meet animals, a comfortable office for employees, storage space, a reception area and covered parking spaces for the department’s vehicles.
In the meantime, Animal Management is occupying a temporary location at 2195 W. U.S. 40, where it has signed a lease to stay for up to 15 months.