After the bids came in well over budget, city leaders will stick with a leaky liner at the Powell Aquatic Center for at least another year.

The city wanted to hire a crew to remove the decade-old liner from the center’s leisure pool this spring and then resurface and repaint the pool. However, when bids were opened last month, the estimated $200,000 job was set to become a nearly $330,000 job under the lowest qualifying offer.

Rather than move forward, the Powell City Council voted Monday to reject all three bids they received and postpone the work.

Although Powell Aquatic Center Co-Director Angela Frank wants to be done with the leaking liner, she told the council that she saw a couple advantages to a delay.

For one thing, Frank expressed hope that going out for bids earlier in the year might net better offers. The pool work will take place during the aquatic center’s annual spring closure, and she said some contractors were already booked up for March.

Additionally, Frank would ideally like to resurface the pool at the same time they refinish the floors in the locker rooms and lobby. While the center’s annual closure typically lasts two weeks, both of these projects are expected to take a month, so scheduling them in separate years would mean two years of longer closures.

If both projects can instead be tackled in a single, four-week closure, “it’s just easier for the patrons,” Frank said. “I mean, extended closures aren’t fun.”

Some council members seemed on board with the idea of doing both projects in the next fiscal year, though City Administrator Zack Thorington noted that no decisions will be made until budget time.

High and
unqualified bids

In this year’s budget, which runs through the end of June, the city allocated $200,000 to remove the leisure pool’s liner and then sandblast, patch and repaint it with either an epoxy or a plaster.

Three firms from across the country submitted bids. The lowest came from USA Construction of Cumming, Georgia, at $95,400. However, Thorington said the company submitted “a really peculiar bid packet” that didn’t follow the city’s requirements.

“If you read their literature, it’s kind of like they’re offering to manage the construction project for the pool,” he said, “And they really gave … no actual bidding specs.”

As a result, the low bid was a $329,255 offer from Pool and Spa Medics of Denver; Mid-America Pool Renovations of Missouri, meanwhile, bid $350,000.

Thorington told councilors they could move forward with the repairs by delaying other work and drawing money from elsewhere in the budget, but he advised against that; he noted the city has already agreed to spend an extra $350,000 to replace the roof and HVAC system at the Powell Police Department, after that bid also came in much higher than expected.

Over a decade old

Frank told the council that, although it will keep leaking, the liner will last another year.

When installed in 2012, it was seen as the most cost-effective way to fix peeling paint in the nearly new pool. The liner cost $39,775, while a full-fledged resurfacing was expected to cost $125,000, according to Tribune reporting from the time. The liner came with a 15-year warranty and staff said it could last up to 25 years.

However, it’s been leaking since the start, causing water bubbles to form beneath the surface of the PVC liner.

With an overhaul on hold, “we’ll just get as much water out from underneath it, like we do every year,” Frank told the council, “and then we can rebid it next year.”

The water bubbles will be drained during the annual spring closure, which is tentatively set to start on March 17 and last for two weeks.

In the meantime, the council voted to take the money that had been budgeted for the leisure pool and use it to reroof the aquatic center. That project will also need to be bid out.