Plans to build the Ames Aquatic Center recently went through a small funding hiccup, when bids were received for the project.

According to the City Council action form from their April 8 meeting, the lowest bid the city received exceeded the construction budget by more than a million dollars. Such a difference in funding would have required major changes to the project.

“Cutting a million dollars somehow would have decimated the project,” said Steve Schainker, Ames city manager. “We would have had to cut out some of the fun factor, and with the amount of time it would have taken to redesign, we probably would have lost another summer.”

A few days after the public announcement of the bids, an anonymous donation of $1 million was submitted for use toward the project.

“Without this, we may have had to reject all the bids and scale back the project significantly,” said Bob Kindred, assistant city manager. “It’s nice to see someone care about the community this much. We will respect their wishes to not be in the spotlight.”

RDG, the private consulting firm working with Ames on the project, is currently examining why the bids were substantially higher than most people expected them to be.

“One reason we have right now is that the bid market is not as competitive right now as many thought it would be,” said Nancy Carroll, director of parks and recreations for Ames. “Also, the state of the economy right now probably factors in pretty heavily.”

Carroll also noted that the length of the project – 18 months – my have worked in conjunction with the economy.

“Companies might have been trying to protect themselves over those 18 months by bidding high,” she said. “We just don’t know much about that right now.”

Even with the $1 million donation, the project is still approximately $10,000 over budget.

However, that amount is easily coverable by the project’s contingency fund.

“A contingency fund is always spelling into a project budget,” Kindred said. “This is a relatively small coverage, out of nine million dollars. We still have plenty of money left, should anything else happen.”

Fortunately for the project, the timing of the anonymous donation couldn’t have come at a better time. The donation came in so quickly that the topic of what exactly might have needed to be cut to save a million dollars never needed to be discussed.

“Because it came in so quickly, we never had to delve into that,” she said.

Thanks to the anonymous donor, the project’s schedule is back on track.

“We reported bids at the last council meeting, and we hope to award the bid contract on April 22,” Carroll said. “After that, we hope to have construction start in early May.”

The lowest bidding company was Sande Construction, which is based out of Humboldt.