Committee rejects bids for new skatepark
High bids likely due to west coast bidders
LANSDALE >> Plans for a new skate park in Lansdale have hit another delay.
Borough council’s Parks and Recreation committee voted unanimously Wednesday night to reject the latest set of bids on the skate park project, after costs came in far higher than estimated.
“It was considerably more — enough so that we think we can do better,” said council member Mary Fuller.
“One of the biggest drivers in the high bids was that, with the specification that we have, all the bids came from the west coast, which drastically added a lot of costs,” she said.
Council and the Parks and Recreation committee, which Fuller chairs, have discussed since early 2016 the possibility of creating a park for skaters somewhere in town, and have spent more than two years evaluating sites, selecting a spot adjacent to Fourth Street Park, then hiring a design consultant and architect while holding meetings to gather feedback and refine a design.
“This is your baby,” Borough Manager John Ernst said to Fuller
as the two discussed the project.
“And what a long labor it is with this baby,” she replied.
A first round of bidding fell through earlier this year when no responses were received, and staff said that was due to a tight timeline pushing to finish the park sometime in 2018. A second bid attempt asked contractors to do the work over the course of 2019, and that second bid attempt did produce three bidders, Fuller said Wednesday night, but none from local companies, due to the strict criteria of prior projects required in the bid specifications.
“One of the issues is based on the parameters, the qualifications, specifications, that we put forward. It severely limited the number of people who could bid on this project,” Fuller said.
‘If we revise the bid package some, and we also potentially phase or split up the bid package a little bit, we can get more local bids that we can accept,” she said.
Early estimates have put the cost of the skate park at roughly $500,000, with half to be covered by state grant funds the borough has gotten authorization to extend into 2019, and the rest from a developer’s contribution to the Madison Parking Lot apartment project. Ernst and Fuller declined to give a specific number, but said the bid results were, in his words, “enough for us to consider rejecting”
Ernst said staff’s early thoughts are to split the prior bid package up into three components: one for the construction of the skate park itself, another for the stormwater management features including a rain garden adjacent to the planned park area, and a third for landscaping.
“As we started to look at the overall bids for the skate park, we realized that it was a premium that was being paid to have companies from the West Coast mobilize on the East Coast, in terms of providing staffing and equipment,” Ernst said.
“One of the specs required that the company needed to provide a specific number of examples of comparable size, maybe four or five, within a certain time frame. One of the things we are looking at doing would be maybe to reduce that number of projects in that time frame,” Ernst said.
Doing so could allow more local firms with some, but less, experience bid on the project, since fewer skate parks tend to be built on the east coast due to longer winter weather periods, Fuller and Ernst said.
“We’re not compromising the project, we’re not compromising the design, but we feel if we relax a few specifications, we can put this out to bid, and get some more local returns,” Fuller said.
“And some preliminary research has indicated that will, in fact, happen,” she said.
Ersnt said staff are aiming to have the three separate bid packages ready by the end of 2018 or early 2019, which should present no problems with using the grant money by the endof-2019 deadline to do so.
“I’m committed to this project. I’m committed to getting it done, as close to what we’ve presented as possible,” Fuller said.
“By looking at it in a different way, and just because of the way the bidding process works, I think this is our best solution, to get in the end the best product that we want, as close as possible to the price we were hoping,” she said.
The Parks committee unanimously voted to reject the three bids, and Ernst suggested the committee wait on authorizing staff to prepare a new bid package until they and the borough’s engineering firm finish evaluating responses and developing new parameters.
“We’ll have a lot of answers to questions that will come up as part of that — ‘What are we rebidding?’ We will try, but I can’t guarantee it’ll be done by next month,” he said.
Ernst said staff will also contact the firms that did respond to see if any of the work can be done by in-house staff, since staff did do some stormwater management work at the borough municipal complex on Ninth Street when staff offices were temporarily located there.
“Depending on which stormwater management systems we choose to pursue, it could be just the creation of a rain garden, to help mitigate stormwater (flow), as opposed to deep trench construction and tying in” water lines, Ernst said.
“There’s a potential that borough staff could help defray the costs for that construction. Then, we’re not paying prevailing wage for some resources we would have to use anyway — those are the type of things we’re starting to evaluate,” he said.
Borough council next meets at 7 p.m. on Nov. 20 and the Parks and Recreation committee next meets at 8 p.m. on Dec. 5, both at the borough municipal building, 1 Vine St.