By Sheldon Spackman

Request for Proposals

Drayton Valley launches request for proposal process in potential new aquatic facility

Jul 19, 2019 | 2:31 PM

Efforts are now well underway in hopes of building a new aquatic facility in the Town of Drayton Valley.

Since July 11, Town officials have issued several Request for Proposals, with the intent to procure qualified consultants to work as part of a highly collaborative team on an Integrated Project Delivery for a new aquatic facility.

Mayor Michael Doerksen says the need for a new aquatic facility has been talked about for roughly 10 years now.

“Some members of the public formed an aquatic committee and we’ve had some councilors sitting on that and it’s just been slowly moving along and kind of just disappeared for a little while,” says Doerksen. “With the last election, there’s a number of councilors who ran on the platform of getting an aquatic facility at least started in our term. It’s a big process but we have to start somewhere.”

Doerksen says the Town’s currently facility which was built in the 1980’s is nearing the end of its lifespan.

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“It’s fairly basic, it has a shallow end for kids, a smaller slide, a bigger slide going into the deep end, lane swimming and I believe it only has five lanes instead of the needed six if you want to have swim competitions,” he explains. “And a hot tub.”

Doerksen says the Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) process will begin with establishing the contractors needed to design the project for council’s consideration.

“You then give them a price and what you’re looking for and it’s up to them to be able to design a project within our budget and deliver on it,” explains Doerksen. “At that point, it will come to both the Town of Drayton Valley and Brazeau County to say whether or not we 100 per cent want to move forward with it. Nothing is written in stone right now.”

Once contractors are selected through the RFP process, Doerksen anticipates it will take them between six and eight months to design a facility that meets the community’s needs and budget, roughly $22 million.

“It would be similar to what you see in Spruce Grove with the Tri-Leisure Centre,” says Doerksen. “You’d have your six-lane swimming pool that you can actually have competitions in and a separate children’s area. One of the issues at our current pool is the lane swimming and the kids area is all combined, so the water temperature is kind of too cold for the kids and too hot for the lane swimmers, so by separating the two, we can make it more comfortable for everyone.”

However, if the desired facility can’t be done within the allotted budget, Doerksen says the contractors will make other recommendations for council to consider.

“We’d then have to determine what we’d want to do moving forward,” adds Doerksen. “But I feel confident that we would be able to get the pool that we were looking for in that $22 million range. I’m thinking it will be sometime mid-winter when it will come to council to decide whether to give it the green light or not.”

If all goes well, Doerksen says shovels could be in the ground next summer.

“I think it’s something the community has certainly asked for, for a number of years and there’s a lot of people excited about it,” he exclaims. “We’re just trying to make Drayton Valley a more attractive place for families to move to. Obviously the economic downturn has hurt us but there’s still job availability and what we’re hearing is we need better amenities to compete with the larger centres and that’s what we’re looking at doing.”