Two engineering consultants made their case Monday night for development of the Algood City Park before residents and Algood City Council.
Kimley Horn partnered with AEI. AEI President Peter Metts said the company uses a process of budgeting the project multiple times and a general contractor to help control project cost.
“With a general contractor on board, we can use his services for value engineering alternates, material costs, labor costs, and during those periods of time if the project is out of budget, we use his service to help us bring it back in check,” Metts said.
Performance Services Business Development Manager Brian Stone said that Performance Services guarantees no change orders for the project and that Performance Services would take on the risk should a project go over budget. Stone also said Performance Services is five months ahead on the project.
“We are gonna get this built faster than anyone else because we had a five month head start,” Stone said. “We’ve worked hard on this. Grateful to Clinton, grateful to all of our partners who started this work in 2019, but we are so far ahead it’s easy for us to just pick up right where we are and continuing working with the design and then ultimately the construction.”
The council questioned how each consultant would include the community in the project. Council Member Luke Hill said how the community involved is a major piece to the project.
“That’s a huge component of it,” Hill said. “You know, I wrote down three key elements of this project. Community engagement, budget and management of public funds, and then historic track record of developing these types of parks. I mean those are my three guiding principles with the community being the most salient one.”
Kimley Horn Landscape Architect Alisha Eley said the best way to have community engagement is to where the people are.
“When we do the five and ten year master plans we don’t hold just an individual public meeting like this and have two people show up,” Eley said. “We are doing next weekend in Smyrna where we are having a booth at their Halloween event. We know there is gonna be 3,000 people there, so we are bringing our survey to them. I think that’s critical. That’s the best use of your guys time and money, you know having us help with any public engagement is lets go to where the people are, let’s go out to the park site on a busy day and lets talk to those folks, lets be at a festival where we know where people are gonna be.”
Performance Services Integrated Project Leader Tim Weber said Performance Services could do community workshops to inlcude community engagement throughout the project.
“We collect that information, wehave even done community advisory boards in the past throughout the design process if that is something that you are interested in doing,” Weber said. “I think it’s a worthwhile process, because in the end it is for the communities.”
The council asked Metts what the biggest cost of the project would be. Metts said in most cases it is removing the soils.
“Rmeoving the soils can always be one of those open black holes,” Metts said. “It doesn’t always have to be as painful as it sometimes can be. The physical structures that we are talking about are gonna take a certain amount of square footage to spot on the site. So locating those and keeping those cost in check are probably going to be very important. How they can stregically locate those and not have to suffer through, the more weight you put on it, the more you have got remove and put back in place.”
Weber said Performance Services has multiple conceptual designs but intially presented a design with the least wetland mitigation. The coucnil asked why not build on better soils where the ground is higher on the back side of the property. Stone said it cost more to build on the backside.
“You do have to run obviously the road, obviously utilities, all those other things,” Stone said.
The council asked both consultants how they could help secure grant funding for the project. Both consultants said they have designated and very experienced experts who work to obtain grant funding for projects.
Algood City Council will meet again Tuesday at 6pm to decide on which engineering consultant to proceeed with for the project.
