Jodie Wagner, Palm Beach Daily News
The Palm Beach Town Council approved a capital grant and operating agreement with the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach on Nov. 12, paving the way for the long-planned overhaul of Phipps Ocean Park to move forward.
Council members unanimously approved the agreement, which will govern improvements to the park and its operations once work is completed. The agreement also includes two 75-year leases to the foundation for areas within the park, including the Little Red Schoolhouse and the Coastal Restoration Center. The Preservation Foundation is spearheading the $30 million redevelopment project and will pay for the majority of the work. The town has agreed to pay for improvements to the Phipps Ocean Park tennis facility and the town’s lifeguard station at the top of the park’s dune.
“We are immensely grateful to everyone on the dais and the town staff for your support over the last four years,” Preservation Foundation CEO Amanda Skier said following the council’s vote. “We are very excited to have achieved this milestone.”
Construction on the project was to have begun in June, but was delayed after the foundation and its partners on the project decided to re-bid its contract.
That decision came four months after the Town Council conditionally approved a contract for a guaranteed maximum price of $30 million to West Palm Beach-based Burkhardt Construction for construction-related services for the park’s overhaul, pending the foundation’s finalization of the capital grant agreement. That agreement was never signed, rendering the contract invalid.
A guaranteed maximum price contract is a legally binding agreement between a contractor and a project owner that sets a maximum price for a contractor’s services.
Skier said the decision to re-bid the guaranteed maximum price contract was made in an effort to obtain more competitive responses from a broader group of subcontractors. She noted the foundation had expressed some discomfort about the contract before the council approved it.
“When we received the GMP in early February, the Preservation Foundation and the design team had some questions and requested some additional information,” Skier told the Daily News in July. “However, we continued to move forward and work with the Town of Palm Beach and Burkhardt Construction in good faith that these items would be resolved. As part of the final review process, there were some issues that we couldn’t resolve without revising the bid packages and rebidding. We all agreed that the best course of action was to rebid the GMP.”