A developer spoke to the Hancock County council and commissioners on Tuesday night about the Build Operate Transfer process.
Hancock County adopted a BOT statute in August of 2022, but has yet to use the process for any projects. According to Bill Spalding, president of the Hancock County commissioners, the county is considering using it for the renovation of the community corrections facility and county prosecutor’s office.
“We’ve just run into a lot of road blocks with getting this project complete,” Spalding said of why the county was looking into this process for the renovation.
The remodel has been in the works for over a year and half, following the prosecutor’s move into the community corrections facility when mold was discovered in the prosecutor’s office.
Greg Martz, a developer from GM Development, presented to the joint meeting of the council and commissioners on July 30, describing the BOT process as a procurement law to help a public entity get a team for a specific project.
In order to procure a team through the BOT process, the county would need to go through three steps before finalizing a contract: dictating the project’s parameters, in which the county gets to set qualifications for what it wants in a team and for the project, a scoping period, in which the prospective teams propose budgets and scopes to the county for how much the project would cost and how long it would take to complete, and a public hearing.
According to Martz, the process gives the county more control over a project than traditional public-private partnerships, with a set scope and maximum budget before ground is ever broken.
The main weaknesses of the BOT statute are that it does not include any requirement for open accounting and does not require the company to repay the county any savings on the project, but those problems could be solved by including those requirements in the contracts for each project. Council member Mary Noe asked if splitting savings between the county and the company was possible, and Martz confirmed that doing so was a common practice and speculated that doing so may incentivize companies to save money over the course of the project.
Spalding said that while the renovation of the prosecutor’s office and community correction facility were the only projects the county was currently planning to use the BOT process for, he was actively looking for more projects which would make sense to utilize the project, saying this renovation was a testing grounds of sorts for the county.
As previously reported, county officials were hoping to get construction started on the renovation project this fall and hoped to have a team finalized by the August 20 meeting of the commissioners.
