City of Macon Selects Design-Build Team for Municipal Pool

April 03, 2023

At the March 14, 2023 Macon City Council meeting, the Council approved the selection of the design-build team to move forward with the next steps in the Municipal Pool project. The design build process is when one entity, the design-build team, works under a single contract with the City to provide both design and construction services. This method of project delivery was previously decided on by the City Council with intent to see an overall cost savings vs. the design-bid-build method of construction.
The City received four responses to the request for qualifications and selected all four design-build teams to provide proposals for Phase II. Phase II is when the companies submit their proposals based on the design criteria and budget set forth by the City and are then scored based upon their proposals. Of the four teams, three responded with proposals. Once the technical proposals were scored, the phase III pricing proposals were opened and scored based on the lowest bidder receiving the most amount of points for that phase. Completion of the phase II and phase III scoring led to Waters Edge Aquatics and Irvinbilt Constructors as the team receiving the highest overall score.
“We are pleased and excited to announce that Waters Edge Aquatics and Irvinbilt Constructors have been approved to move forward with the pool project” quoted Mayor Tony Petre. “Next steps will be to review the design plans and make adjustments to fit the specific needs for Macon,” said Petre.
“We set forth a budget of $3.5 million for the base bid project on the original requests for proposals from the design-build teams. Several add alternates were requested to allow for options of additional features should the budget allow. The City currently has just over $3.7 million in reserves to allow the project to move forward with no financing needed” said Petre.
The funds for this project is made possible by the ½ cent sales tax for parks and storm water improvements approved by the citizens again in 2013.

Site preparations are already underway and groundbreaking is expected to begin as soon as this Summer with intentions to be open for the 2024 swim season. The pool will be located at the new park property on Bourke St. next to the disc golf course.