Our View: Get out sledges for the Tower

Talk about it

Well, it happened again. The Davison County Commission hit yet another stumbling block Tuesday in its seemingly never-ending quest to demolish the much-maligned Tower Building on Miller Avenue.

This time, it’s the bidding process for the demolition that is causing the problem.

Demolition bids were opened June 1, but the awarding of a bid was put off to a later date. Then, on June 10, one of the bidders, VanderPol Dragline, came to a commission meeting and gave some unscheduled input to the commission.

A competing bidder was upset by that, and rightly so. No single bidder in an ongoing, public bid process should be allowed any more or less access to the deciding body than any of the other bidders. The competing bidder complained to Commissioner Gerald Weiss, and Weiss passed the complaint along to the other commissioners.

The upshot is that when it came time to award the bid this past Tuesday, the commission instead decided — on the advice of an attorney — to postpone the award until the other bidders could be given the same opportunity to speak to the commission that VanderPol Dragline was granted.

So, it’ll be at least another week, if not more, until a bid is awarded. The long, painful saga of the Tower Building will get a little longer and a little more painful.

Though we realize we sound like a broken record at this point, let us reiterate our position on the Tower Building: It cannot come down soon enough.

The county bought the building, which formerly was part of the old Methodist Hospital, back in 1993 for $425,000 (the lowest demolition bid is $515,000). Time showed what a bad idea the purchase was. The county filled only a tiny fraction of the facility with offices and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to heat, cool and maintain it.

The county commissioners finally decided last year to demolish the Tower Building, but the process has been slowed by the removal of asbestos, paperwork on a grant request to help fund the demolition, the commissioners’ inexplicable failure to budget any money for the demolition beyond the hoped-for grant, etc.

Given all the delays, maybe the commissioners would be better off inviting members of the community to show up with sledgehammers and knock the Tower Building down one swing at a time. For as much as the county’s taxpayers have forked over to keep the building up all these years, they’d probably relish the opportunity to take it down.

Tags: our view, opinion