The Brattleboro Selectboard held a special meeting Tuesday evening to consider and endorse the work of the NEA Our Town Arts Screening Committee, as well as to award a bid for the Green Street retaining wall work to be done.
The meeting wasn’t televised, though, so your report is based on their meeting materials.
According to meeting materials…
NEA Our Town Grant Finalists
Thirty five proposals were received by the town for the National Endowment for the Arts Our Town Grant, and the Screening Committee made its recommendations to the board that 12 of the projects be declared finalists in the project.
The NEA Our Town Grant finalists and their proposed projects, according to the Screening Committee:
- Scot Borofsky’s mural
- Chris Chapman’s mural
- Jeanne-Marie Eayrs’ mural
- Yetti Frenkel’s mural and mosaic
- Jonathan Gittelson’s camera obscura
- Liz Lavorgna’s homeless stories project
- Tess Lindsay’s Brattlebenches
- Michel Moyse’s video projections
- Andy Reichsman’s video and audio production
- Brenda Siegel’s outdoor stage, sculpture, and expansion of a dance festival
- Dan Snow’s storybook stone sculpture
- Andy Wasserman’s project to collect voices relating to the river
If all went according to plan, and there were no surprises, the Selectboard would have endorsed this list as finalists, sending them on to the next phase of the process in which they would more fully develop their plans for presentation.
Award Big – Green Street Retaining Wall
Again, according to the meeting materials…
Three bids were received to do the work of re-building the Green Street retaining wall.
The low bidder for the project missed some portions of the project, and the other two bids were significantly higher than expected. Town staff theorize that the high bids are due to a late request for bids in this construction season.
The low bidder, B. U. R. Construction, left out a portion of the “geogrid,” and guard rails, which amounted to nearly $130,000 in missing work from their $305,000 bid.
Zaluzny Construction bid $597,900. Mitchell Sand & Gravel bid $714,038. The project budget estimate was $434,000.
The advice of Stevens & Associates, the design engineers for the project, is to reject this round of bids and request new bids, with a 2016 completion date. The hope would be to get both lower prices and complete project bids by trying again.
If the Selectboard took the advice of Steven’s & Associates, new request for bids will go out in early September, due in December, with work proposed to start no later that August 15, 2016 and to be completed in 90 days.
…
That’s it. Did you attend? Is this what happened?
Disappointing to see so many
Disappointing to see so many mural proposals in the short list when there were other really interesting projects submitted. I hope the final decision includes a little thinking outside of the box in terms of what people would be interested in looking at over time.This grant is a rare opportunity to have a really creative project happen – not to mention a whole lot of money to get it done.
Hope this opportunity doesn’t get wasted on the mundane or the ordinary.