Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By RICHARD JENKINS
Hurley — The Iron County Board of Supervisors approved hiring Foth Infrastructure & Environment, LLC as the engineering firm for the reconstruction of Saxon Harbor Tuesday.
It’s a key step to re-opening the park by the county’s target date of May 2019.
Rain and flooding last sumer during a July 11 storm destroyed the harbor.
The De Pere, Wis.-based Foth was one of three companies bidding for the project, according to the Iron County Forestry Department.
The project will be split into two parts, with the first phase consisting primarily of surveying and gathering information necessary to calculate the price for engineering and construction of the harbor’s campground and marina.
While the cost of the contract’s second phase hasn’t been calculated or approved, the initial phase will cost no more than $155,681 and be complete within the next two months, with the second phase awarded near the end of May.
It is the second time Iron County hired an engineering company for the project, having contracted with a team of companies led by Coleman Engineering in August. However, county and Federal Emergency Management Agency officials it was working with were unaware of a federal procurement regulation requiring a certain number of “socio-economic-disadvantaged businesses” from a federally approved list be contacted for bids before a contract could be awarded.
The failure to comply with the regulation was discovered during a U.S. Office of Inspector General audit, Iron County Forester Eric Peterson informed the county board in November, resulting in a recommendation FEMA not reimburse the money the costs already accrued.
Peterson estimated in November those costs were roughly $90,000.
At the time, he said that while that is the recommendation, FEMA isn’t bound by the Inspector General’s office and likely would still pay if the costs are deemed reasonable.
“Right now, we have to roll the dice on the $90,000 — submitting it and getting reimbursed for it, we may or may not. But if we had continued under that contract, all the money we spent there may have been not reimbursed,” Peterson said in November. “The fact that they were here and red-flagged that right away allowed us to stop it before it got really bad.”
FEMA is ultimately responsible for covering 75 percent of the eligible work at the harbor, with Wisconsin Emergency Management and Iron County each paying for 12.5 percent of remaining costs.
