Bulloch County’s government is ordering studies of its facilities and workforce needs, including forecasts and plans for the next 10 years, by two separate consulting firms at costs totaling $531,920.

A total of 67 existing county-owned buildings have been identified for the facilities study, but it will not include the jail and Bulloch County Correctional Institute, for which a third firm was contracted last year to do a preliminary study.

By two separate unanimous votes during their Jan.16 meeting, the county commissioners accepted a proposal from Pond and Company to develop a master facilities plan for $287,950 and a proposal from MGT of America Consulting LLC to do the workforce development study for $243,970. Both proposals were recommended by county staff members who reviewed proposals from multiple companies and heard spoken presentations from two finalists for each project.

Although separate, the workforce study and facilities plan will answer related questions, County Manager Tom Couch told the commissioners.

“The master facilities plan is concomitant with the workforce study in that whether we update existing buildings or look to the future with new facilities, we’re going to calibrate the amount and type of personnel that we need,” he said.

“For example, it’s quite likely that in the future, that we know we need to have a judicial complex,” Couch continued, “and if you talk to the courts, as commissioners, I think you’ll find out that as population growth occurs, that triggers certain things in the court system, like how many judges you have, how many clerks that you have, the size of the judicial circuit, the D.A.’s office, public defenders and so forth.”

This illustrates how a county’s needs for local government employees, and also of buildings for them to work in and meet the public, “tends to snowball” because of “triggers,” or population thresholds, that are sometimes established in state law, he said.

The total of 67 Bulloch County government buildings includes not only major public buildings such as the historic courthouse, North Main Annex and Judicial Annex, but also smaller office and shop buildings, buildings in parks operated by Bulloch County Recreation & Parks, the county Fire Department’s 14 stations, and small community buildings that serve as voting places in several of the rural precincts.

Additionally, the Pond and Company consultants will be asked to assess the need and plan for some future buildings, such as a freestanding elections center and a possible indoor recreation facility, as well as the new judicial center, Couch said.

Jail & BCCI not in this contract

But one large expanse of county-owned buildings, the complex on U.S. Highway 301 North that includes the Bulloch County Jail and neighboring Bulloch County Correctional Institution, or BCCI, will not be included in the master plan to be developed by Pond and Company, Couch said. In March 2023, Sheriff Noel Brown, Chief Deputy Bill Black and BCCI Warden Randy Tillman – who is stepping out of that role to be the county’s new public safety director effective this Feb. 1 – pitched a concept for an update of the complex to the commissioners during their annual budget retreat.

That conceptual Bulloch County Law Enforcement-Public Works Complex master plan called for construction on-site to expand the jail, replace the aging buildings of BCCI (a county-owned prison that houses state inmates) and add a transitional center for inmates in the final months of their sentences.

In April 2023, the Board of Commissioners approved a contract for the planning firm Goodwyn Mills Cawood, or GMC, to do what Couch called “a preface to a pre-design study” for the jail, BCCI and public works complex for $33,000.

That resulted in a site layout.  Now Couch says he hopes to have GMC complete that study, but he hopes to “value engineer” the cost down from GMC’s initial quote, which he said would add more than $100,000.

The county had $500,000 budgeted for the master facilities plan for  all other buildings and the workforce development study, and  again, the accepted proposals carry a combined $531,920 cost.

“The good news is,  between the two,  we were only a little bit over budget, but we still have to resolve what we’re going to do the with public safety and public works complex,” Couch  said in an  interview. “We’ll probably have another discussion on that, but we’re trying to capture everything else in the meantime.”

Range of bids

For both the separate master facilities plan for other county buildings and the study of workforce needs, county staff issued a request for proposals Nov. 9 and opened the written proposals Dec. 7.

Six proposals were received for the facilities planning, but the county staff’s review team reportedly disqualified three for being submitted late or missing required items. Fees requested by the remaining three ranged from $287,950 to $816,179.

So the winning proposal by Pond and Company carried the lowest price, but cost was not the only consideration, Couch said. Pond and one other finalist, BDR, or Business Development Resources, made oral presentations, and the staff review team chose Pond for reasons that include their extensive experience making facilities plans, particularly for the public sector, he said.

Workforce study

Seven companies submitted proposals for the workforce development study, with an even wider range of offered prices, from $34,000 to $867,900 for the basic scope of work. Couch said staff members thought the firm making the lowest-price offer did not understand the size and scope of the work.

Bulloch County’s government, as of Friday, had 485 full-time employees, with some vacancies, for approximately nearly 500 total full-time positions, county Human Resources Director Cindy Mallett told the Statesboro Herald. A few hundred more are hired seasonally for part-time positions, with the largest number going the recreation department’s staffing of Splash in the Boro Waterpark, she noted.

The two consulting firms that gave spoken presentations as finalists were MGT of America Consulting LLC and Diane Meiller and Associates.

Mallett said the planned study will have three major parts.

The first will be a current workforce analysis, including a review of organizational structure and of skills required for current jobs and “identifying any strengths and any gaps that might exist in our current workforce” and “training and development needs,” she said.

The consultants are also to evaluate “employee engagement,” meaning “their satisfaction and commitment for the job,” and compare all of these factors to industry standards.

The second part will be a future workforce needs analysis, to answer, ‘Where do we want to go?’ ‘Where do we need to go?” she said. “They would be analyzing future staffing needs, recommending, if needed, any type of structural alignment, helping us develop a very strong succession strategies.”

That means plans for how vacancies in key jobs can be filled, either temporarily or permanently, through promotions or reassignments.

Then finally, the third step in the project will be the establishment of “workforce performance metrics,” standards and measurements that will allow the county staff to monitor the items studied, for 10 years or as long as possible before a new study is needed.

“I don’t want to speculate that the answer will be additional people, but I believe it’s fairly likely, especially looking in a window of time, that there will be additional staffing that need to be added over time with population growth and to keep our  service level at a good place,”  Mallett said.

The commissioners’ votes authorized staff members to negotiate specific terms of the consultants’ contracts subject to review and approval by County Attorney Jeff Akins.