Culminating a monthslong process, Salt Lake County has chosen the architect and general contractor who will design and build its new Sandy convention center.
Gillies Stransky Brems Smith Architects, of Salt Lake City, and Layton Construction, Sandy, won out over seven or eight other bidding teams for the $48 million job, said Julie Peck, director of the county's Community and Support Services Department.County and Sandy officials scheduled a news conference at 1:30 p.m. Friday, after the Deseret News press start, to publicly announce the selection. They were also scheduled to unveil artist renderings of how it will look when finished.
The convention center's exhibition hall, at 243,000 square feet, will be comparable in size to the Salt Palace Convention Center's hall, at 256,000 square feet. Meetings rooms and other facilities will also be included.
The convention center, which will be called the South Towne Exposition Center, will be built on 36 acres near 9500 S. State. Construction will begin next fall, with an anticipated completion date of Dec. 1, 2000.
County officials chose Sandy as the site of the new convention center last May. The new convention center is intended to ease the crush of conventions descending on the Salt Palace, increase the valley's capacity for conventions, and locate a facility in the south part of the valley that is experiencing substantial commercial growth.
The county received initial bids from contractor/architect teams last fall, and of those teams three finalists were chosen last December to participate in the bid's design/build phase.
The three finalists were given a two-inch-thick "program," or set of requirements, detailing what the county wanted included in the project. They had two months to come up with the best possible project they could design and build.
"Everything was in there," Peck said. "Nobody could give us absolutely everything -- there was so much."
During those two months the bidders did not communicate with the county, nor the county with them.
In design/build bids, the type of bid used to award the I-15 reconstruction contract, the bidders are given the requirements and considerable freedom to propose how they propose to fulfill them. Bidders spend a lot of money doing preliminary research and design work, and losing bidders are given a stipend to partially compensate them -- in this case, $50,000 each.
Peck said bidders typically spend about three times the stipend. "It barely touches what they've invested." By giving out the stipend, the county is free to use the material and design concepts the losers have come up with.