Efforts to develop a skate park next to Fourth Street Park in Lansdale hit a snag on Wednesday night, as the Lansdale Parks and Recreation Committee unanimously voted to reject all three bids they received for the project.
Committee chair Mary Fuller stated that all three bids came from the west coast, and due to the distance, the bids came in at a significantly higher cost than the committee had anticipated.
“With the specifications that we have, all of the bids came from the west coast, which added to a lot of the costs,” said Fuller.
This represents the second failed bid process since the skate park project began in 2016. The first round of bidding resulted in no offers, which the committee stated was due to too short of an initial timeline. The committee believes that with the right amount of planning, a third bidding process will successfully lead to a developer that can complete the project prior to the expiration of the grant, which occurs at the end of December 2019.
Fuller and Lansdale Borough Manager John Ernst stated that they intend to break the next bid into three separate parts—skate park, storm water and landscaping—in an effort to secure local contractors to complete the project. By doing so, it would alleviate the need for a west coast developer, as well as the additional costs included with their use.
Committee member and Lansdale Borough Councilwoman Carrie Hawkins-Charlton asked if breaking apart the bid into three sections would require any planning or design adjustments, but Fuller and Ernst stated that the proposed three-part bid would maintain both the design plan and the intended quality of the skate park.
“We’re not compromising the project,” said Fuller. “We’re not compromising the design, but we feel that if we relax a few of the specifications, we can put this out to bid and get more local returns.”
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