San Marino’s City Council approved the Parks and Public Works Director and city staff’s recommendation to scrap previous plans for the proposed Lacy Park restroom renovation project in favor of a new future proposal for the restroom design.
The most recent project that’s been brought forth at previous meetings was designed and analyzed before Parks and Public Works Director Michael Throne began with the city of San Marino, and included plans to work within the existing structure, renovating the exterior and interior.
Throne had said at the council’s Oct. 27 meeting that the proposed project could end up costing more by presenting unforeseen challenges, and at last week’s meeting said though the cost of materials could be reduced there’s no guarantee that the total costs would go down.
Councilmembers at the October meeting expressed their unease with moving forward with the project given the difficulties working within the existing structure and asked for options to be identified for discussion.
Throne identified project goals at last week’s November meeting including accessibility, increased amount of bathroom fixtures and best possible value, as well as “does it fit into the park?”
Councilmembers were faced with three options: one being to award the renovation contract to the identified best bidder and re-specify products and materials used, the second would be to re-bid the renovation and eliminate certain items of work and re-specify products and materials and the third would be to construct a replacement restroom, Throne’s and city staffs’ recommendation.
“The reason we looked into that is you’re not going to be hampered with using the existing structure, and I totally get why the community started with that, ‘we’ve got an existing structure, it’s not overly old, can it be reused?’ but one of the things is that the square footage cost of renovating something, trying to stay within that box is going to be more expensive than just clearing the slate, or going toward a very utilitarian sort of project.”
Throne said this approach would also allow the project to restart and would be benefitted from bringing in specific expertise, namely, architects who specialize in public park restrooms, as well as having it go through the city’s design review committee—a process it hadn’t undergone previously.
He said it will be about $11,000 more expensive than choosing to go with the previously designed project today, but it would allow for a project that the community is “interested in having, versus trying to make the project that we have try to fit into something that is obviously very difficult.”
The councilmembers, three of which acted on their final agenda item ahead of the swearing-in of the newly elected councilmembers in December, approved the item.
