Pool work begins Oct. 28

The pool is slated to be substantially complete and ready to open by June 13, 2015. For each day the pool is not finished past that date, the contractor will be charged $2,000.

Interim Director Karl Cozad recounted the meeting when the subcontractor bids for the project were first reviewed on Oct. 3.

“We were going, ‘Oh boy,’ and not in a good way,” he told the board.

Initial hopes were that a contract could be signed that day, but the costs were too high, and the construction manager/general contractor for the project, Triplett Wellman, spent the next several weeks painstakingly going over the bids.

Cozad said the “war room” at Triplett Wellman, which he said they actually call the “bid room,” had spots for some 25 to 30 specialties that will be involved in building the pool.

Some areas had multiple bids to consider, and others had none at all, and Triplett Wellman had to go drum up business for those.

In some cases, they did “value engineering,” where they found methods or materials that produced the same quality for less money.

The contingency on the project is three percent. “That’s a little short,” commented district board member Travis Dray.

“It’s a tight animal, I‘ll tell you,” Cozad agreed.

He scoured for every dollar he could find, including using some money from this year’s parks budget.

“We’ve stretched and pulled and identified every loose dollar we can find, without reducing services,” he said.

The parks district will repay the loan out of savings it will realize when it can stop paying $19,200 a year on the office space it rents now, and it will also see savings when it hires a new executive director at perhaps $15,000 less a year than the former director.

The former director was paid $89,000 a year and the new one might be paid in the $70,000 to $75,000 range.

Another potential area of cost savings for the district is shifting some of the cost of health insurance onto employees.

“It’s a rare entity that picks up 100 percent of employee and employee’s dependents” insurance, he said.

Cozad said the district has seen an average nine percent increase in the cost of health insurance for each of the last five years. The cost to provide it stands at $139,000 a year.

The new pool includes new parks offices, a bathhouse, eight-lane pool, splash park, slides and climbing wall.

When costs came in too high, the contractor considered options from changing the pool filtration system to using different slides, to even eliminating the second floor parks district offices that will go on top of the bathhouse, Cozad said.

Other potential future spots of cost cutting, if need be, are changing the durable plastic lockers in the bathhouse to less durable and cheaper metal ones. Another potential savings is eliminating stoves in the concession stand.

In addition to a $3.7 million bond approved last November, which turned into $3.8 million with favorable interest rates, the district got $220,000 from the Columbia Gateway Urban Renewal Agency for the slides and climbing wall, as well as a $100,000 state grant for the splash park.

That is $4.1 million but doesn’t account for other non-construction costs like permits, architect and engineering fees and inspections.

The district released former Executive Director Scott Green from his contract in August. It received 20 applications for a new director, and a subcommittee will whittle that down to five for the board to consider.