Just two months after Council approved an $800,000 increase to the Troy Aquatic Park Maintenance Project, city staff are back with another ask: an additional $82,000, bringing the total authorization to $2,582,000. The Recreation and Park Committee will take up the request at its Monday, August 24th meeting, and the numbers behind it deserve the same scrutiny residents gave the last increase.
The memo sent by City Staff tells a short but telling story. Bids on the project were opened July 30. Two bids came in. The low bid, from Brumbaugh Construction, Inc., landed at $2,582,000 — $82,000 above the $2,500,000 ceiling Council set in June.
The scope of work has not changed. This is still the same maintenance package first outlined in January: pool decking, gutters, piping, filtration, fencing, and the entry canopy. What has changed, again, is what the market is willing to charge to do that work.
The $82,000 increase is a rounding error compared to the jump from $1.7 million to $2.5 million earlier this year. But one sentence in the memo is more consequential than the number itself: previous bidders on this project declined to bid the second time around, because they had already been awarded other work and could not take on more.
Only two contractors submitted proposals. That is not a competitive market — it is confirmation of what this project already flagged. The pool of contractors qualified to do specialized aquatic construction in this region is small, and it is getting smaller relative to demand. When bidders who competed for a project the first time walk away the second time, that is not noise. That is a market telling the city there is nowhere left to negotiate.
The City Staff memo states plainly that re-bidding is not prudent. Waiting another year would likely mean higher costs for both materials and labor, not lower ones. The Recreation Board met August 20th and unanimously recommended Council approve the higher authorization so a contract can be awarded to Brumbaugh Construction.
Staff are also proposing that, during construction, they work with the contractor and the consulting engineer to value-engineer the project back down toward the $2,500,000 mark. That is a reasonable middle path: authorize the higher ceiling now to lock in a contractor and a schedule, while still trying to trim costs once work is underway.
Because of the timing — the pool is closed for the season and the work needs to start soon to hit the 2027 opening — staff are requesting emergency legislation, which would allow Council to act without the usual three-reading process.
The Recreation and Park Committee meeting is where residents get to hear this reasoning in public, not just read it in a memo. Three questions are worth listening for:
Whether Council presses staff on why only two contractors are still willing to bid on Troy’s aquatic work, and what that means for future capital projects at the park.
Whether the “value engineering” plan is presented with specifics, or left as a vague promise to find savings later.
Whether emergency legislation moves through without the normal three-reading window, and how Council explains that shortcut to the public.
Two increases on a project that has grown by nearly $900,000 since January, is not simply a story about concrete and steel prices. It’s a story about how thin the region’s specialized contractor base has become, and how little leverage a city has when only one or two firms can do the work at all. Troy is not being asked to pay more for a bigger project. It is being asked to pay more, again, just to finish the project it already committed to.
For residents who feel like these numbers move faster than the public conversation around them, Monday’s committee meeting is the moment to ask the follow-up questions.
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