Construction on the new city pool will begin as soon as possible after the Hartselle City Council approved a $2,856,902 bid from Hartselle’s Woodward Construction Tuesday night.

Woodward Construction submitted the lowest bid after giving the city $16,000 deduction on the outside of the company’s sealed bid. With the new price, the city must borrow $3.4 million to pay for the project, up from $2.2 million initially projected by city officials.

The other two bidders were Garber Construction with a base bid of $2.871 million and Building Construction Associates with a $2.885 million base bid.

The bids also contained eight alternate bids that the city council will consider whether it will accept from eliminating landscaping projects to changing the materials used in the construction.

However, City Councilman Tom Chappell suggested that the city go ahead and accept the lowest bid without any deductive alternates because the cost could only be reduced by $58,000.

“We only have one chance to do this right,” Chappell said. “These deductive alternates will only reduce the overall bid by about $58,000, which over the life of a 30-year bond is not that much. So I think we just need to approve the lowest base bid and go with it.”

Mayor Dwight Tankersley said he and Frank Miller worked with John Godwin of GBW Architects of Decatur to get the bids closer to the $2.8 million goal set at the Dec. 13 meeting.

Tankersley said at that meeting that they wanted to reduce the cost of the project without losing too much of the scope of the new construction.

Some of the changes to the bid order included reducing the pool deck area by 4,000 square feet, eliminating the need for retaining walls on certain sides of the pool, changing the sewage system from a pump to gravity flow system, reducing the gauge of the fencing, reducing the gauge of concrete reinforcement steel and eliminating one bathroom due to the smaller pool deck.

This was the second round of bids for the new pool. On Dec. 13, the city’s lowest bid was $3.1 million, which was $900,000 over their budgeted cost.

In a related matter, the council entered into a contract with TTL, Inc., of Decatur to perform testing samples on the construction materials.

City Attorney Larry Madison said this would prevent the same problems from occurring in the city pool.

“If you don’t enter into this contract, you could be right back where you are now,” Madison said. “The old pool used materials that weren’t up to specification. TTL will do testing to make sure that the materials are up to the architect’s specifications. I think this is $7,500 well spent.”

The council also approved a parade permit for West Hartselle Baptist Church to hold a 5k run beginning at the Hartselle Tabernacle. The event is scheduled for March 17 and will benefit Relay for Life.