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VIENNA -- It's back to the drawing board in Vienna after legislation for the renovation of the Jackson Park Pool failed on a tie vote by city council on Thursday.
Mayor Randy Rapp said he was surprised the vote ended in a 3-3 tie.
"I thought it would go through just fine," he said. "We'll get our heads together and figure something out."
Finance Director Amy Roberts Thursday presented council a plan to finance the pool if the bid for its renovation was accepted. She suggested either paying $3.8 million from the city's capital reserve fund and financing $3 million or paying $3.5 million out of capital reserves and financing $3.5 million.
Rapp said the city had $1.6 million in Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act funds and $1.1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds.
"We now have $2.7 million dollars left in those two funds that were given to the city of Vienna," he said.
Rapp said the city would be required to form a building commission to oversee the pool renovation project. Members were required to be members of opposing political parties.
Council member Kim Williams said she wanted to see the ARPA funds used on other projects.
"I would just caution everybody about ARPA funds. I still would like to see those funds go to stormwater and infrastructure stuff," she said. "As the mayor said, our capital reserves are $11.762 million. That's pretty significant. Part of the reason why our capital reserves are so high is because we haven't spent a lot of money on projects."
City Recorder Melissa Elam said the city also will pursue grants for the project.
"We've got these two options here. The third thing that plays into this is that we will be pursuing grants.That will offset. We can either pay ourselves back into capital reserves or we can do financing," she said.
Roberts presented council with two bids for the pool renovation project. United Construction Co. Inc bid $6,844,802 and Grae-Con Construction bid $7,474,000. Omni Associates reviewed the bids and recommended the city accept the proposal from United Construction.
Elam distributed a report to council comparing the two bids. She said unit pricing factored into the differing amounts.
Council member Chris Mancuso said while he supports the city of Vienna having a pool, he thought the bid was too expensive. He compared the pricing from Parkersburg's Southwood pool renovation to United Construction's proposal.
"Their pool includes 10,591 square feet of brand new pool, a new pump house, a renovated pool house, a pool deck, splash pads and other play features. It's 268,000 gallons of water," he said.
The city purchased equipment separately from the base bid for $1.2 million dollars and the approved bid was roughly $3.7 million for that project. Bringing the cost of the project roughly under 5 million dollars."
"Jackson Pool is receiving a new pool deck, new slides, a new children's pool, a new pump house, a renovated pool house and a few new play features around an existing pool," Mancuso said. "It's about 6,600 square feet. The difference there is we have a much deeper pool, so we have more gallons of water at 293,000. When we were discussing this last year, we were shocked and said in no way could this pool be $6.5 million dollars. It's going to have to be less than 5 million. Why is our pool $2 million more?"
Council members Kim Williams and Tom Azinger referred to the cost of the slide, which is around $2 million of the package.
"I want to make sure that families here in Vienna have that pool and it just shows how much we care about our community. But we have to balance that with all the other needs that we have," Williams said.
Elam said she thought council should proceed.
"I think we are at the place in this council where we have to move forward with this. This pool project should have never gotten to this point. The powers that be, previous councils and previous administrations should have been taking care of this pool a whole lot better all along the way," Elam said.
Elam also addressed comments council members have received from the public about the cost.
"For every complaint that any of you have received about the cost, I expect you to get 10 times the complaints that the city is not moving forward with the pool project. It's not going to get any cheaper," Elam said.
Kristen Hainkel can be reached at khainkel@newsandsentinel.com