Bids opened for Sebring civic center

By the time the Sebring High School class of 2010 graduates, Dave Travers hopes the Highlands County Fairgrounds arena will be ready.

Bids were opened Tuesday afternoon, the latest in a series of steps that started seven years ago to construct an indoor civic center at the fairgrounds that will host car shows, youth livestock programs, FFA projects, weddings and conventions.

Travers hopes DeAngelis Diamond Construction of Naples, which submitted the low bid of $1.77 million, will start construction in August.

"Our negotiator is working on a contract with them," Travers said, while he was driving from Sebring to Miami. "Once we get a contract signed, we hope to get started by Aug. 1 or so."

Local subcontractors won't be given preference in their bids to install windows or supply the seats.

"We can't do that," Travers said. Since state dollars are involved, all bids have to go to the lowest bidder.

If the bids had come in higher than $1.8 million, the size of the building would have shrunk, said Skip Adams, fair board president.

"We were afraid we'd wind up with a shell of a building with no strengthening (for hurricanes) and no bleachers," said Adams. "Fortunately, with the economy the way it is, we're all real pleased to get what we're going to have."

Before construction begins, two buildings must be demolished, Adams said, the old skating rink, and one the flea marketers use before they were moved into the cattlemen's pavilion.

When Gov. Crist signed SB 2800 in 2007, Travers hoped construction would start after the February 2008 fair.

But the project has hit a series of snags since it was first conceived in 2002.

History

Gov. Jeb Bush vetoed the bill once, perhaps twice, State Rep Denise Grimsley said in 2007. She helped push the item through the Florida Legislature. Highlands County is designated by the state as a host county for refugees if a hurricane heads for the coast, she said, but there's really no adequate shelter available. Most are small and old, and it's cheaper to build a new shelter than to rehab the old ones, she said.

In October 2007, the fair board was ready to advertise for bids to design the 32,000 square-foot building, but along came a mandate from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to build a center strong enough to resist a 200 mph wind.

"Which is tornado force," Travers said then.

It was also overkill, he said. Only two tornadoes in Florida since 1950 are thought to have ever reached five on the Fujita scale, Travers said. The state had been using American Red Cross guidelines for hurricane shelters, which require buildings at a minimum to withstand wind speeds reaching between 100 and 150 mph.

The Florida Department of Agriculture and the state Division of Emergency Management enlisted the help of Florida's members of Congress to get FEMA to relax the tougher shelter guidelines. The federal agency apparently backed off when Sen. Bill Nelson and Reps. Gus Bilirakis and Ginny Brown-Waite were told a waiver would be granted.

The civic center, which doesn't have a name yet, will occupy the center of the fairgrounds, between the present ticket booth and office. Both will be included in the new building.

It will seat 4,500 people in pull-out bleachers and chairs for the center of the floor. It will have nearly four times the capacity of South Florida Community College's auditorium.

Ownership

The Highlands County Fair Association will own the new building, Travers said.

The fair association is a private, non-profit 501(c)(3) charity, with a board comprised of 21 community members, he said. The fair board members are also members of Sebring Firemen Inc., which was formed in 1927 to create an athletic field for Sebring.

Today, the Firemen still own Firemen's Memorial Field; the Fair Association owns and operates the buildings, Travers said.

Meetings of the fair board are open to the public, but the agenda isn't publicly posted, he said. "We try to meet the first Monday of every month, but during the summer, we just call them as we need to."

Fair Arena Bid Winners

Construction CompanyBid

DeAngelis Diamond$1,773,167

LEMA Const. & Dev.$2,004,000

Brooks & Freund$2,101,229

Twenty-one companies bid to construct the civic center. Bids were also taken on bleachers (alternate #1 amount); hurricane standards (#2); and insulation (#3). DeAngelis Diamond Construction of Naples was the apparent winner. Unsuccessful bidders have 72 hours to protest.

View all bid totals at www.hcfair.net/Grant/HCFAGCBidTab.pdf