The Demopolis City Council building committee on Monday looked over the bids for the renovation of the municipal complex, and plans to make a recommendation to the full council on Thursday.

The committee is made up of mayor Mike Grayson and council members Mitchell Congress and Bill Meador. The committee met at City Hall along with Brian Brooker, senior project architect for Ellis Architects Inc.; interim police chief Tim Williams; police chief-select Tommie Reese; and municipal court clerk Karen Broadhead.

The bids included 13 alternate additives, or additions to be made to the original layout, including a garage door opener, generator, exterior lighting and aluminum awnings. Bidding companies also provided bids to do each of the alternate jobs.

The committee took input from Williams, Reese and Broadhead and agreed to include the alternates of a garage door opener, an operable wall partition and a generator for dispatch and the computer server. Other alternates could be added if the council felt that they were needed and may be paid through any remaining grant money.

The average bid for the garage door opener was about $1,200, for the partition $about $16,500 and for the generator about $11,000.

The bids were opened on Jan. 27 at the Demopolis Police Department, the location of the municipal complex, which will include the police department and a city court.

The lowest of the base bids (without alternates) included: Revon Bigham Construction of Tuscaloosa, $1.435 million; CRL Construction of Selma, $1.443 million; Hall-Taylor Construction of Tuscaloosa, $1.495 million; J.T. Harrison Construction of Tuscaloosa, $1.528 million; Psalms Construction of Tuscaloosa, $1.585 million; Amason and Associates of Tuscaloosa, $1.645 million; and Bob Morrow Construction of Tuscaloosa, $1.661 million.

The council has $1.7 million to spend on the project, money received from a grant last year.

“We had a very good turnout,” Brooker said. “Up until the bid day, we had about 16 bidders on the list. A few dropped out towards the end, but we ended up with 10 bidders. On a project of that scale, that’s really good. You usually don’t have that many.”

“It just goes to show you that, with the economy the way it is, people are interested in what would be smaller projects, just to keep their crews working,” Grayson said.