Ste. Genevieve Aldermen Go Back To Drawing Board On Renovation Of City Hall

Ste. Genevieve officials will take a fresh look at the plan to renovate the City Hall building.

Almost one year after voting to pay Bacon Commercial Design $12,700 to formulate a design plan, aldermen expressed a desire to “start from scratch” on the project, the price tag for which has continued to rise.

In the end, it was decided that more meetings need to take place to chart a course for the project.

One thing that bothered Mayor Paul Hassler was how the bidding process was handled.

Donze Construction turned in the lowest bid for the original specifications.

However, ideas on how to approach the project continued to change, including what to do with the board’s meeting room, which had previously doubled as the municipal courtroom.

“There’s a little bit of suspect stuff going on,” Hassler said. “It’s nothing that anybody’s done illegally or anything like that, but there’s some stuff that don’t look good to me. For one thing, when we started this project, we had in mind that this was going to be a courtroom and we were going to rearrange it.

“When we first bid this out, the bid was for a lot of stuff that we didn’t need any more. We did have two bidders. … Donze [Construction] came in as the low bidder. Then we decided we weren’t going to do all this, so we rebid it. I don’t know if that was right, without having someone come in and look at it and get a chance at it.

“Then the process came up with water in the basement. … We decided to have people look at the basement.”

Donze Construction was the only firm to bid on the basement work.

“We need to regroup here,” Hassler said, expressing frustration that carpeting and improved lighting had apparently been dropped from the plan.

See complete story in the October 16 edition of the Herald.

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