The pool situation is even worse than it looks.
The city went out to bid to have the pool built using the construction manager at risk method. They received seven bids, all from local contractors. Supposedly each of the firms is ready to get started tomorrow.
In a monumental abuse of the contractors the city has now decided to use competitive sealed proposals. Now that these seven firms have invested untold money hoping to get a fair break from the city and the city has seen all of their numbers, the city is going to use a different method of contracting.
Seven bids are already in. The could start right now. Instead, the city’s timeline now indicates that they should be through with the new bid process by May of 2016. They say they will start construction after that with occupancy scheduled for fall of 2017.
Maybe they will award the bid to the same group that got San Jacinto Plaza.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Personally, I doubt that this will ever be done.
LikeLike
What is the city’s reason for changing the rules of the game? My guess is that they took the information from the first bids and gave it to other contractors who will now use that information to fine-tune their sealed bids.
LikeLike
None of their friends or relatives bid the job with enough “kickback”
LikeLike
I agree. Seems like they want to give somebody else a chance to bid and they find this roundabout, change-the-rules-in-the-middle-of-the-game crapola to do it. If it smells fishy…trust the nose.
LikeLike
This was supposed to be the first QOL project! How can the bid process be extended to May 2016? Sounds like they’re stalling because they don’t have the money. They should get a decent architect that could design a building within budget.
LikeLike
El Paso has had a long history of wasting taxpayers money by not getting QOL projects underway In a timely fashion. The longer the city waits to get these projects underway, the cost of materials and labor goes up due to normal inflationary trends. Many times we’ve seen a loss of up to 20% of monies allocated for a given project just because our city dithered so long that they could no longer afford the project as originally envisioned. We taxpayers aren’t getting our monies worth on these bond projects due to departmental incompetence. Yes, the Plaza renovation nightmare is a classic poster child for our taxpayers getting the short end of the stick.
We do deserve MUCH better, but I’m no longer holding my breath.
LikeLike