Projections show cheaper sand for beach projects

As final details of the town's comprehensive beach plan take shape, town leaders learned they will get more sand than originally planned for less money than originally thought. 

Public Works Director Isaac Brownman told the Town Commission on Monday  the projects will cost an estimated $37,094,730 for 1,023,000 cubic yards, enough to fill 310 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Originally, the town was budgeting close to $40 million for 912,000 cubic yards.

“It’s a little bit piecemeal, but sometimes that’s how you have to massage and manage these beach projects to maximize what you have, what’s available at the time and how you can get it on your beaches,” Brownman said.

Weeks Marine is working on three beach projects on behalf of the town, which is now breaking the project down into five numbered segments. “Sometimes we engineers like to change things, so we changed the nomenclature of the segments from A-B-C to 1, 2, 3,” Brownman said. “There were reasons for that because the segments were actually becoming split further and further down into smaller segments.”

There are some differences in the new projections. The biggest differences are Segment 4 initially planned for 175,000 cubic yards of sand and Segment 2 initially planned to receive 185,000 cubic yards of sand.

Work on Segment 4 is borrowing sand from Longboat Pass. Manatee County also used sand from the pass for its Coquina Beach FEMA project.

“Manatee [County] is going to take the sand they need and whatever is left, we’ll be able to apply it over on the Gulfside Road area,” Town Manager Tom Harmer said.

Brownman explained how the town has saved money using Cottrell Contracting for Segment 4.

“At the same time we were bidding our project, Manatee County was also bidding their portion of the FEMA project and they have a contractor. They got some good numbers, good results,” Brownman said. “We contacted that contractor to excavate the remaining volume and they gave us a very, very good unit cost…the $17.32 [per cubic yard].”

Brownman said the town had budgeted $22 per cubic yard for Segment 4.

For most of the town’s beach projects, it will cost the town about $33 per cubic yard of sand.

“It is far less than what we thought,” Brownman said. “We thought we were going to get it around $50 a cubic yard.”

Brownman said while the overall project is forecast to come in nearly $3 million less than the initial estimate of $39.9 million, he wants to see the total cost of the bids for Segments 5 and 6 of the project.

“With any beach project, as many of you know, there has to be an element of budgetary flexibility not knowing what those bids are going to come in at,” Brownman said.