Asbestos drives up demolition cost of former Linn county home

CEDAR RAPIDS - Demolition of the empty former county home just northeast of Marion has proved more costly than the Linn County Board of Supervisors had thought when they approved a contract for the work in September.

The culprit: newly discovered asbestos in the roof of the sprawling building, 1860 County Home Rd., which most recently was occupied by the Abbe Center for Community Care.

On Wednesday, the supervisors voted to move ahead on a change order on the demolition project, which will increase the cost 120 percent, from $373,000 to $819,350.

'You hope projects go as you planned,” said Supervisor Linda Langston, the board's chairwoman. 'This isn't one of those.”

D.W. Zinser Co. of Walford easily won the demolition contract in September with the $373,000 bid, which bested two other bids of $739,000 and $1.28 million. The bids were based on a pre-demolition analysis of the 1970s-era building that did not identify much asbestos on the site.

Zinser discovered extensive asbestos in the building's roof after it arrived to begin the demolition work, the supervisors said.

The supervisors on Wednesday concluded that it would cost the county much more to seek new bids rather than keep Zinser on the project and approve a project change order.

New bids would require the county to pay Zinser some money for the time it already has put in on the project, Supervisor Ben Rogers said.

The supervisors said Zinser's square-foot cost to remove asbestos is lower than other estimates obtained by the county.

Supervisor Jim Houser said asbestos was being phased out on construction projects from about 1973 to 1978, but the county home, built in 1976, unfortunately did not escape asbestos use, he said.

Langston said the asbestos in the building is Linn County's and so it is the county's responsibility to remediate it, even if extensive asbestos was not identified when the initial contract was bid.

The demolition contract called for the work to be done in March, and Langston said she did not anticipate much of a change in the timeline.

She said the county will delay improvements planned to its O'Brien Building, 825 Third St. SW, to pay for the increased cost of the county home demolition.