Another roadblock for Wallace pool

WALLACE — The Wallace City Council held a special meeting on Monday night where they unanimously rejected a $818,260 bid to repair the city pool.

In November, the council rejected a $726,440 bid from contractor S&L Underground hoping that moving the project from a winter start date to a summer start date would lower the bid.

The new bid, also from S&L Underground, was reportedly increased due to S&L potentially having to subcontract parts of the job, as well as price fluctuations in the planned materials that would be used.

The bid, which is for a full repair of the pool, is a far cry from the $450,000 that engineering firm Terracon had estimated over the summer.

The initial bid came as a bit of a shock to city officials, who were expecting something more between Terracon’s estimate and a rough $500,000 estimate from city engineer Jim Roletto, but this time around they knew they were taking a risk and were slightly disheartened by the new bid.

“We gambled and I hate to say it, but it didn’t work out in our favor,” said Wallace Mayor Lynn Mogensen. “This is a tough pill to swallow, but this is where we stand right now. It’s the only bid we have in front of us.”

While they were given options to potentially reduce the bid down to around $746,000, it would mean making a lot of cuts to the project that the council just isn’t willing to make right now.

After discussing the situation and acknowledging that while they do have more than $225,000 to put toward the project, which includes grant monies, donations and the last two years operation budgets.

The pool will once again be closed this year, which does have $60,000 allocated to it for operation, which will be put toward the project as well, but that still leaves them short more than $400,000.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s $743,000 or $818,000, we don’t have either of those,” said Councilman Dean Cooper.

“We’re in a tough spot here,” Mogensen said. “It’s unfortunate that we didn’t have some more competition in the bids.”

After voting to reject the bid, the council began to discuss ideas surrounding procuring the funds to repair the pool.

Several ideas were tossed around, things like pool liners and even spraying the pool with fiberglass in an effort to make it watertight.

After some discussion the council agreed that they would begin exploring the idea of a potential bond.

While the details are still being researched, some of the ideas associated with the bond centered around forming a pool district — which would be similar to the Wallace School District based on those who use the pool — running a zero dollar bond in effort to gauge public interest in funding the repair of the pool and then seeking a loan, or actually running a special bond.

No decisions were made, instead the council was instructed to look into the issue, which will be discussed again at the regularly scheduled Wallace City Council meeting on March 11, at 6 p.m.