Indiana Borough Council is expected tonight to award the bid for the renovations to the community center building, which houses the Indiana Free Library, the Jimmy Stewart Museum, and Downtown Indiana, Incorporated.
In July, Council rejected all of the bids because they came in way over budget. The lowest bid was roughly a half-million dollars above the $900,000 the borough is prepared to spend. Council decided to break the project up into individual components and bid each one, hoping to attract more bidders and give smaller, local contractors a chance to do the work. But Public Works Director Dave Fairman says that in the end, a single contractor came in with an acceptable figure that council will consider tonight.
Fairman says tonight’s bid will be for exterior work on the 105-year-old building. Work on the interior will be bid in January or February, and he expects that within a year, the entire project will be done. He says the work schedule is ambitious because the grant that will help pay for it has a stipulation that the money be spent by next fall.
The community center building has housed the Indiana Free Library since 1934, and the Jimmy Stewart Museum since it opened in 1995.
