Pitkin County will eliminate the Pitkin County Solid Waste Center’s Mercantile building in order to cut down costs for its plan to expand the landfill.
The Mercantile program will remain, but the building itself will not be reconstructed after it’s demolished. It’s one of several cuts the county is making to its proposed plans to redevelop the landfill after the only bid the county received for a construction manager/general contractor came in 30% over budget.
The county estimated the entire project would cost about $31 million. FCI Constructor’s bid came in at around $40 million, Pitkin County Public Works Director Brian Pettet told the Pitkin Board of County Commissioners during a work session on Tuesday.
“We’ve got a project, but we’ve got to make these cuts in order to make it happen,” Pettet said.
The county had four buildings slated for construction in the solid waste center’s redevelopment. Only two are “absolutely necessary,” and a third is required to cover recycling, Pettet said.
Pettet and Tyler Carvell, the solid waste center manager, presented several big-ticket items the county plans to cut from the project to reduce costs by about $11.2 million. Eliminating a new Mercantile building from the project’s scope will save $5.45 million alone.
It will become an asphalt pad with some changes to involve more public drop programs, Carvell said. The county wants to incorporate more drop-off programs to include books, textiles and other items that the county currently has to ship elsewhere.
“We’re going to lump all that together and it’s kind of going to be a pretty nice public hub for stuff that we can reuse, stuff that we can recycle and everything in between,” Carvell said.
In addition to eliminating a new Mercantile building, the county can also cut a proposed wash bay addition to the operations and maintenance building and a new public drop-off Z-wall.
The proposed Z-wall would have been constructed on a 10-foot retaining wall with rolloff bins on the bottom that would allow people to throw trash down into the bin, Carvell said, rather than requiring them to throw the trash up into the bins. There are ways to mitigate it without a retaining wall, including ramps or stairs to the bins, he said.
The county is also planning to reconfigure the scope of a proposed solar program. Initially, the county wanted to cover as much of each building as possible using solar power, but it is too expensive to complete, Carvell said. The administration building will be constructed with solar power infrastructure, and the rest of the buildings will be solar-ready, “whenever we have the money ready to go for that.”
In 2024, Pitkin County voters approved a ballot measure that would authorize up to $22 million in revenue bonds for the expansion of the solid waste center. It wants to extend the life expectancy of the landfill by an estimated 70 years.
The BOCC will see a final project cost and scope in September after finalizing subcontractor pricing. There is a chance the project ends up slightly under budget, Carvell said, if the bids from additional subcontractors are more favorable. It could mean adding scope back into the project.
BOCC member Ted Mahon said it’s a good thing to start out leaner.
“There’s nothing wrong with starting out a little smaller and just adding as needed instead of just doing it all at once,” he said.
The county wants to start vertical construction in spring 2027.