News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Cookeville City Council will consider approving a preliminary engineer and design agreement for the new aquatics center Thursday night.
Leisure Services Director Rick Woods said that the agreement will help the city through the process of determining what type of facility should be built, a location and a cost structure.
“We received seven proposals which were reviewed and scored by a committee of seven, and those scores were based on the scoring parameters outlined in the RFP,” Woods said.
Woods said that this preliminary engineer and design agreement will not include designs for the actual facility itself. He said the design process would be the next step after moving forward with the agreement and getting community feedback on what it would want.
Woods said that he and his team reviewed each proposal and found each of them to be strong proposals from qualified companies.
“I averaged the scores for the proposals you have in front of you,” Woods said. “And I will say that most of these companies are qualified and these were not easy to score. They’re all quality companies and most of them would do a terrific job. It was very close, and most, again, provided very good proposals.”
Woods said a fee structure proposal was not part of the original RFP, but that he has requested that information from Lose Design, the leading candidate for the agreement. He said that should he not receive a satisfactory fee structure before Thursday’s meeting, he wants to pull the item until they have a ready-to-execute contract or explore steps with another proposal.
City Manager James Mills said that they have a budgeted amount for the project and will use that as a starting point.
