WARREN — Trumbull County commissioners sparred Thursday over a change order request regarding the completed Brookfield wastewater treatment plant project.

The board approved the request to provide contractor Thomas Construction Inc. with an additional $71,677.10, revising the total contract amount to $17,707,592.51. The request was approved with a 2-1 vote.

Commissioner Niki Frenchko was opposed, saying she did not agree with how the change order was presented to the commissioners.

The change order request contained 15 items, some dating back to the fall of 2022. The individual items within the change order included the purchase of various items for maintenance and safety purposes, ranging from $17,753.51 to $1,239.88. The order also included a $17,525.73 credit back to the county for part of the project that could not be completed.

All of the work noted in the change order had already been completed before the commissioners met Thursday. Frenchko argued that every item within the change order, and all of the items that were previously approved, should have had to been approved through the board before they were completed.

“The board of commissioners are the only ones who have the statutory authority to sign off on change orders,” Frenchko said. “Not the department heads. So if we want to do things correctly, the board of commissioners needs to be signing off on them. All of these changes have already taken place.”

Frenchko said that she did not believe that departments outside of the commissioners should be allowed to approve the change order requests. Frenchko said that she believed a better system would be for every request to be immediately sent to the commissioners for approval, not allowing them to “build up,” forcing the commissioners to approve as many as 15 at a time.

“As soon as there’s a change order, send it over,” she said.

Commissioner Mauro Cantalamessa said that change orders like the one presented Thursday in which multiple items are approved at one time are common with large projects. He said that they help simplify the process and keep work moving in an efficient manner.

“You have a $17 million project with enormous amounts of change orders that come along with a project like a capital improvement project,” Cantalamessa said. “It’s not unheard of, No. 1, to see these types of change orders. No. 2, if you were to stop the project and wait for our approval for every one of these change orders, time is money. It would never get done. This would be double or triple the time it would normally take.”

Frenchko said she believes that the current change order process is flawed. She thinks that the commissioners should be more aware of the changes that contractors are making during their projects. Frenchko said that this is one of the processes of Trumbull County government that she wants to see improved.

“None of us knew about it,” she said. “That’s a flawed process if the commissioners don’t know about a $70,000 change order until the day before the meeting in which they’re expected to vote on it, and all the work has already been done.”

Board President Denny Malloy disagreed, saying that the commissioners do not need to know about every nut and bolt regarding every county project. Frenchko was upset specifically about the contractors requesting $1,239.88 for fuel surcharges. Malloy said that it was not an issue to him.

“I don’t want to know about some fuel thing on a $17 million project,” Malloy said. “I’ll leave that up to the professionals.”

Malloy said that the final prices for the project were negotiated between the contractor and the county. He said that by approving the motion, the commissioners were simply paying their bills so that they could move onto the next project.

“The work was already done,” Malloy said. “Now they’re just negotiating the pay. The bills are coming in, and they’re saying, ‘Hey, we had to go over on this or we had to go over on that.’ The architects and the engineers approved all of this stuff. A lot of them were, ‘Hey this price came in more than this, once we got the bill from the supplier.’ We could have said no, and not paid the bill, but that’s not being a good neighbor. If we said, ‘Nope, we said we’re paying $17 million and you’re stuck with it,’ how many more people are going to want to come work for Trumbull County if we don’t take care of changes as they happen?”

Throughout the project, the county has approved eight change requests worth $1,006,792.21, including the one approved Thursday.