When they first started selling us on the skate park, the estimated cost was around $200,000.
Pretty small potatoes, in the grand scheme of things – considering City council wasted over ONE POINT FIVE MILLION dollars (or almost EIGHT TIMES MORE) just to renovate the Old City Hall building that nobody (except City council and City employees) gets to use.
Then a year later in August 2021 (page 20), we were informed that actually, the cost will be more like $400,000 – a straight doubling of cost in one year.
NOW, hidden down on page 65 of the latest council packets, Finley informs us that “consultants estimated the increased cost of construction to be on the order of $170,000“.
By my math that makes it $570,000 for this thing – but the packet (page 69) tells us $470,000
Of course, that same page also tells us a lot of what ISN’T included and will be “done by others”:
So your guess is as good as mine but I’d say we are looking at WAY over a half-million bucks for sure. Sounds very expensive to me. I paid less than that for my house – and this is just a bunch of shaped concrete. According to the plans (page 69 again) the Lampasas skate park will be 5,000 square feet.
Let’s see what the experts say:
The average price to design and build a skatepark is from $40-$60 per square foot. Most projects cost around $50 per square foot in total. Skateparks rarely are more than $65 per square footand can sometimes be as low as $25 per square foot.
At the average cost of $50 per square foot:
- A 3,000 square foot skate spot will be $150,000 and will support a few skaters at a time.
- An 8,000 square footskatepark will be $400,000and will serve a neighborhood of about 25,000 residents.
So we’ll get 5,000 square feet instead of 8,000, it will cost about $100,000 more than the above assumptions, and Lampasas county has pretty close to 25,000 residents. It works out to about $100 per square foot – or double what the experts say is average.
All in all, it sounds like the kind of typical fucked-up, overpriced deal that TJ Monroe and Cathy Kuehne would slobber over and call “an excellent price” while a couple hundred grand of tax dollars disappear unaccounted for into thin air (see also: Campbell Park pre-fab bathroom, new City council chambers, Azbell A/V system, Business Pork Project, RKJ elevator, etc).
I also don’t hear a peep about “volunteers” or “fundraising” anymore. That charade has been dropped. This will come 100% out of the taxpayer’s hide. As usual.
I can GUARANTEE you that neither Kuehne nor Monroe (nor Williamson) has spent one second of their time Googling “skate park costs” over the last two years. This is all play money to them – especially Kuehne who is up for election next month.