County officials hire architect to design new building
Uniontown architect Michael S. Molnar was able to parlay a $52,800 contractual obligation from the Fayette County Health Center Authority into a potential $208,000 contract with Fayette County by agreeing to fold the smaller cost into the larger one. Molnar was hired in January by the health center authority to perform a feasibility study and design a $2.4 million third floor addition to its building.
However, after a project financing snafu surfaced, Molnar agreed to “eat” his fees to date if the commissioners hired him as the architect for a new $2.6 million building to house the county’s Mental Health/Mental Retardation Agency, said Commissioner Sean M. Cavanagh.
At the standard architect fee of 8 percent of construction costs, Molnar would make $208,000 for his work on designing and overseeing construction of the new 24,000-square-foot building in the Fayette County Business Park.
Commission Chairman Vincent A. Vicites says that Molnar’s willingness to credit the new project with money either paid or due to him from the old one was the determining factor in his vote to hire Molnar for the new building without a competitive selection process.
“I was just trying to solve a problem, because this change in plan … seemed to present a problem,” says Vicites.
“I wanted to resolve that problem.”
However, Vicites says that in the future he will seek competitive requests for proposals for all architectural services, along with other professional services.
“I’ll RFP everything from this point forward. I have no problem with that,” says Vicites.
“I think it’s very healthy to RFP things. It gives everybody a chance.”
Cavanagh, who makes no qualms that Molnar is his architect of choice, says that Vicites is being disingenuous by voting to hire Molnar without competition and then stressing how he’ll handle things differently in the future.
Cavanagh also says that he thinks Vicites’ goal in hiring Molnar was to bail out a health center authority board dominated by his political allies, including board member Martin Griglak, after its members made a bad decision.
When the five-person board hired Molnar for the third-floor addition on Jan. 23, the only dissent came from board member Walter Vicinelly, who said he had had no time to review the contract being offered Molnar.
Vicinelly also said he thought the health center board should have given other architects a chance to bid on the project. He told Griglak, “You’re pushing this thing through and it’s going to come back to haunt us, Marty.”
A copy of that contract, obtained from the authority, shows it was signed by Molnar and by health center building administrator Dan Visnauskas.
It is dated Jan. 11, which is 12 days before the board formally approved the hiring in a 4-1 vote.
However, that may have been the date when the contract was drawn up, not when it was signed.
Lisa Ferris-Kusniar, director of the Fayette County MH/MR, says her agency orally agreed to take out a long-term lease on the proposed third floor addition but never had a written agreement.
She also says MH/MR provided $24,000 to the health center authority to underwrite the third floor feasibility study – $5,000 in one installment and $19,000 in another.
MH/MR never had a contract with Molnar, says Ferris-Kusniar, who adds that the $19,000 installment was recently paid “with the understanding that (it) will be used toward the new building” and not the third floor addition.
Commissioner Ronald M. Nehls, a staunch advocate of seeking competitive proposals for architecture work, says he set that preference aside and joined his colleagues in voting to hire Molnar for the new MH/MR building. Nehls says he did so in order to beat a June 30 deadline for obligation of state funds that otherwise would have been returned.
“I said (to MH/MR), ‘I prefer to do a RFP (request for proposals), but I don’t want to hold up your project,” says Nehls.
“The important thing (to me) was that it was a decision of MH/MR the whole way, not the commissioners saying, ‘You will do this,’ or, ‘You will do that.'”
Nehls was less than thrilled with Molnar’s cost estimates and work on the recently completed minimum-security addition to the Fayette County Prison. He says he now has reservations about the circumstances surrounding the $52,800 contract fiasco at the health center authority.
“That’s a heck of a lot of money to shell out for something that hasn’t taken off yet, and didn’t even have the approval of (all) the commissioners,” says Nehls. He adds that in general, “There’s too much doing business by word of mouth” in county government.