Fairhope’s long-awaited soccer complex on Manley Road is moving forward again after the City Council voted Monday to have engineering firm Preble-Rish redesign the project under a new $3.5 million budget. The vote followed months of city interviews with construction management firms interested in the project, though council members and Mayor Tim Kant signaled during Monday’s discussion that the city now intends to manage construction itself rather than hire an outside firm.
The project has been stuck in cost negotiations since late July, when Summerdale-based Summit Industries LLC submitted the lone bid for the 10-field complex at $5.49 million, more than double the roughly $2 million the city had originally budgeted. That bid covered only grading, drainage, parking lots and the soccer fields themselves, leaving out sidewalks, fencing, irrigation and lighting. The City Council rejected the bid on Aug. 11, sending Kant and council members back to the drawing board to find ways to bring the price within reach.
Under the city’s fiscal year 2014-15 budget, $3 million had already been set aside for the complex. Council members added another $500,000 ahead of Monday’s vote to reach the new $3.5 million total. Kant said some council members had pushed for a budget as high as $4.5 million, but the final number reflects what the city determined it could spend this year without taking on new debt. “I looked at how much the city could actually afford spending this year without borrowing any money, and that was the most that I could actually come up with to move forward with the soccer fields,” Kant said.
The city has owned the roughly 40-acre site at the intersection of Manley Road and Baldwin County 13 since 2009, when it purchased the land for $875,000. Preble-Rish, which had already been paid about $90,000 for the original design, will now rework those plans to fit the reduced budget. In the process, officials decided city crews would handle a portion of the construction work themselves to hold down costs, and agreed to break the project into multiple bid packages rather than seeking a single contractor for the entire job.
Splitting the work into phases is intended to widen the field of interested contractors and increase competition on each piece of the project, a strategy city officials hope will avoid a repeat of the single, over-budget bid that derailed construction plans earlier in the year. With the redesign now underway, Fairhope officials are aiming to get the rebid process moving so that work on the long-promised soccer complex can finally begin.