It’s been more than three years since November 2016, when the Camp Verde Town Council approved $7 million in bonding in order to construct its new Camp Verde Sports Complex off of McCracken Lane.
In the time since, the park project has faced a series of delays, including a lawsuit from neighboring residents and an unfavorable round of construction bids that would have cost more than the town could afford.
At a meeting on Wednesday, Feb. 19, the Camp Verde Town Council unanimously approved a bid for the first phase of construction from Tierra Verde Builders. The total cost of the bid approved by the council was $3,712,675, which town staff hope to be able to lower through value engineering.
“What we will do is we’ll look at the project. We already have identified certain things that we think we can look at from an engineering perspective,” Camp Verde Public Works Director Ron Long said at the meeting.
He pointed to examples such as the baseball dugouts or the foundation of fences, which he argued could be made for less money than in the initial bid.
“We don’t want to cheapen it, we don’t want something that’s going to blow over,” Long said of the fence foundations. “But it appears to us that it’s a quite expensive component of the baseball field.”
Value engineering is seen as a goal by the council and town staff because the full plan approved by the council, which will feature two soccer/football fields and two baseball fields, is more expensive than the $3.1 million that the town has left over from its initial $7 million bonding to construct the park. With park construction requiring additional features beyond the Tierra Verde bid, including a planned restroom and concession stand [costing an estimated $350,000], electrical wiring needed from APS [$85,000], field lighting, which the town has already planned to purchase from a separate company [$450,000], and other such features, the total cost of the whole project is anticipated at close to $4.8 million.
The council’s vote on Wednesday commits the town to pay the entirety of the cost of the bid one way or another, with the town and council anticipating a future loan of $1.5 million to pay for costs over the remaining funds. The town council decided not to seek a pared-down version of the park, with only one baseball field, less effective drainage infrastructure and no permanent rest- rooms, seeing the value of the full park as envisioned as worth the extra costs to the town.
Representatives of local youth sports leagues came forward at the council meeting to advocate for the full park, arguing that the town’s children needed more places to play.
“I have 17 teams and two fields,” Tanya Munday, president of Camp Verde Little League, said at the meeting. “Do you know how impossible that is for us?… We need these fields …. It’s very sad to have to tell a kid, ‘You can’t play this year. I don’t have room for you.’”
The council has not yet approved the expected loan to pay for the remainder of the construction costs. According to Town Manager Russ Martin, the town anticipates a potential road project for which they may have to take out loans in the late spring, and since the town could get construction started before then with the funding they currently have available, he expects it will be easier to apply for the park loan at the same time as the road project loans to save town staff’s time and effort.
According to Martin, the town has in recent years been paying off purchases of IT equipment and other equipment leases, which total $200,000 in annual payments.
This will drop down to $50,000 in the coming year before being completely paid off in the following year, giving the town the financial ability to take on a $1.5 million ten-year loan in annual payments.
