MARSHALL — Plans for a new Aquatic Center in Marshall will be moving forward – but on a slightly smaller scale than first proposed.

Marshall City Council members got a look at a new design concept for the Aquatic Center, during both a work session and a regular meeting Tuesday. Representatives of Stockwell Engineers and construction management firm Contegrity Group said the new concept included smaller pools and buildings than in the original plans, and an estimated total project cost of about $18.98 million.

“With the new design, some of the big moves that we made overall, were just reducing the size of items to get us back closer to within budget,” said David Locke, of Stockwell.

Locke said the new design reduced the overall square footage of the pool area by about 20% to 22%. However, Marshall parks and recreation superintendent Preston Stensrud said that would still make the new Aquatic Center larger than Marshall’s current pool facilities. The new pool would have a capacity of 960 bathers, compared to 685 currently, Stensrud said.

Council members approved the redesign. Contegrity representatives said the goal for the new plan would be to go out for bids at the end of January.

In August, bids for the original version of the Aquatic Center plans came in more than $5 million over an engineer’s estimate of $16.5 million. The council opted to reject those bids, hire a construction manager, and look at redesigning the new center.

On Tuesday, Locke went over some of the changes in the new design proposal. The new proposal will combine the Aquatic Center’s bathhouse and mechanical building. The center’s recreational pool would still have a zero-depth entry, but it would be slightly smaller than originally planned, and have a smaller play structure, he said.

The new design reduced the center’s lap and diving pool from eight lanes down to four, Locke said.

The center would still have a “leisure river” feature. “The length of the river has not changed,” Locke said. However, additional features like water sprayers were removed to help reduce square footage of the feature. The design includes only one water slide, but Locke and Stensrud said that slide would be longer than the slide at the current Aquatic Center, and be big enough to accommodate inner tubes.

There were several options for alternates that could be added to the new Aquatic Center design. The list of alternates included two additional water slides, a splash pad, and a climbing wall for the deep water pool.

The alternates did not include demolition of the existing Aquatic Center near Legion Field Park.

Larry Filippi of Contegrity said the estimated cost for the base bid of the redesign, including the site work, buildings and aquatics, came to about $14.15 million. Contingency costs, and costs like construction management, architect and engineering fees, would bring the total to $18.65 million. Additional items furnished by the city, like sound system and concessions equipment, would bring the total estimated project cost to $18.988 million.

The city plans to use funds raised by Marshall’s local option sales tax to help pay for the Aquatic Center project. There has also been a total of about $571,000 raised in community donations for the project.

“Unfortunately, with the higher bids than we anticipated back in August, it did kind of mean literally a pause on fundraising,” said Marshall City Administrator Sharon Hanson. “I think if we can get some good momentum from good bids, hopefully, with this redesign that could provide some extra efforts and hopefully some additional interest from community members.”

“After the bids come in, we’re going to go back and see where we’re at. And we’re going to go back and try to raise some more money to keep the integrity of that facility we had originally talked about,” said Marc Klaith, of the Aquatic Center fundraising committee. “There’s certain parts of it that we really feel need to be put back in.” One key example was the splash pad, he said.

Council members voted to authorize Contegrity and Stockwell to develop final redesign plans for the Aquatic Center.