tim.thornton@roanoke.com 981-3131

Roanoke County's search for the builder of its new public safety center ended where it began - with Northrop Grumman.

Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday evening to give the company a $26 million contract to design and build a new home for the county's police, fire and rescue and information-technology departments.

The project's cost, including consultant fees, insurance and other expenses, will top $28 million. That's $6 million more than county officials predicted less than four months ago. The total bill, financed over 30 years, will exceed $42 million.

The deal doesn't include a new radio system, though that was presented as a necessity in a supervisors' work session in December.

The county needs a new radio system regardless of whether it builds a new public safety building, Assistant County Administrator Dan O'Donnell said then. The most up-to-date part of the county's radio system will reach the end of its life cycle in 2008, according to his report. Another part of the system reached the end of its life expectancy in 2003 and has been out of production since 1998.

But Northrop Grumman said the county should wait to replace its radio system. Construction Dynamics Group, the county's consultant, agreed.

"That's why we hire a consultant," O'Donnell said Tuesday.

Tuesday's vote approved spending nearly $800,000 to keep Construction Dynamics Group on the project.

The idea of building a new public safety building first surfaced publicly in February 2003. O'Donnell told supervisors the county needed to study the present public safety building on Peters Creek Road and the needs of the departments working there.

Though it wasn't mentioned then, Northrop Grumman had approached the county about building a new public safety center weeks earlier.

Northrop Grumman is a $25 billion company with 120,000 employees that is perhaps best known for serving customers at the Pentagon. The company's client list also includes the Internal Revenue Service and the Royal Thai Air Force. Its products range from nuclear submarines to information-technology systems.

Two other companies offered competing plans. A consortium called Safety First - which included Electronic Data Systems Corp., a company founded by Ross Perot more than 40 years ago - dropped out after the first round of reviews.

The Public Facility Consortium, which included the Roanoke architectural and engineering firm Hayes Seay Mattern & Mattern, competed to the end, but county staffers and the county's consultant agreed that Northrop Grumman had the better proposal.

Instead of using usual governmental procurement processes, the county followed the Public-Private Education Facilities and Infrastructure Act, a state law designed to let local governments build faster and more cheaply than they can with traditional methods.

County officials had expected to choose a builder in May.

Supervisor Joe McNamara praised the process.

"It's allowing government to work more as the private sector would work," he said.

The act allows most of the process to go on behind closed doors. The project's price and financing can remain secret until negotiations are finished. Information the company deems proprietary remains secret even after the contract is signed.

Tuesday's board meeting included a public hearing on the project's financing that had no public comment, another in a series of closed-door meetings about the project and the board's conditional approval of a contract that hasn't been completed and remains a secret.

The new center will be built on a 10-acre tract adjacent to the county school administration office off Cove Road, near Hanging Rock.

The county and the schools reached an agreement in July that traded the land for the building that has served as the county's public safety center for nearly 20 years. The county also agreed to replace an old slaughterhouse the schools are using as a warehouse and to find money to renovate the present public safety building for the schools' use. That building was constructed in 1939 as a school.

The converted school is too small to serve the county's public safety needs, O'Donnell said Tuesday. The roof leaks, and the electrical system is outdated. The new building will be twice as big - 80,000 square feet - will offer improved security and will be built to withstand high winds and earthquakes.

"We really are in dire need for this project to proceed," Supervisor Butch Church said. "The folks out here need to know, yes, we're cautious with their dollars, but this project is long overdue."