County paving project includes base plan, alternatives

Holmes County byways should get a facelift soon as the Holmes County Engineer’s office begins to lay out its plans for its summer paving project.

During a meeting with the Holmes County commissioners on Monday, June 15 at the Old Jail commissioners’ office in Millersburg, Holmes County assistant engineer Cory Baker opened the lone bid proposal submitted for the upcoming 2020 0.25% Sales Tax County Road Paving Project, slated to begin later this summer.

The only submission was from Melway Paving, which submitted a total bid of $1,778,742 for the entire project. The base bid is for work on County Road 50, 68 and 70 and will cover approximately 28 miles of road.

Baker also broke the bid down into several alternate bids for specific projects. Alternate bid one for work on County Road 77 was $323,956.76; alternate bid two for work on County Road 100, 100-A and 101 was for $247,044; alternate bid three for work on County Road 120 was $198,243; and alternate bid four for work on County Road 186 and 187 was for $288,443.

Baker said if the county is able to do all of the road work, it would total just under 30 miles of pavement.

“We had to break it down into a base and four alternate bids because of the coronavirus shutdown,” Baker said of bidding the project as a whole and in four smaller bids. “We wanted to see how the money played out from the sales-tax fund. Also, our OPWC grant wasn’t affected. We are still waiting to hear on how that is going to go.”

Holmes County engineer Chris Young said of the projects, “We are definitely going to do County Road 120 (south of Berlin), mostly because we are replacing the curb and gutter there right now.”

Baker said once the county is able to get a sense of the gas-tax revenue, which is down $100,000 this month, along with the sales tax, they should be able to get a better sense of whether or not the county can do the alternate jobs near the end of July. Young said they hope to start on the base bid projects in early July with the goal of completing the projects in 60 days.

Commissioner Ray Eyler said recent figures show the county’s sales tax down 9.4%, but he said because of big months in January and February, the county is still ahead of where it was last year.