GRAND FORKS – The design of the Altru Indoor Sports and Aquatic Complex will be finalized in the coming months as the city prepares for a planned groundbreaking in early summer.
“The next major action is to work on design development in January and February,” Grand Forks City Administrator Todd Feland said. “We are going to have a more refined design and work on a new cost estimate for this facility.”
The Grand Forks City Council has already approved schematic designs for the building, choosing what council leaders would like included in the final structure. This phase, which began in the fall of 2024, aims to
create final design and cost estimates for the city council before their final decisions.
The facility will be located just south of the Alerus Center along South 42nd Street. Plans currently include an indoor turf, a 50-yard swimming pool, an educational pool and pickleball courts. What will be included in the final design will likely depend on what the city can afford.
Latest estimates put the total cost of the project at $110 million. The facility itself was estimated to cost $101 million and the necessary road and water infrastructure site work was estimated to cost approximately $10 million. The city Finance Department said the city has the capacity to borrow about $100 million in bonds for the project, with work on the site coming from company funds.
The city has also received other donations and is working on other naming and sponsorship opportunities at the facility. For example, Altru Health System gave
the city invested $10 million for the project, which also secured the naming rights.
Spring will likely be decision time, according to Feland. This is when the final design, construction documents and initial rounds of bidding will be presented to the council.
“It will be a good moment of truth to know what our estimates were and how those bids were received,” Feland said. “Hopefully this will give us confidence that we have done really well in bidding and that we can move forward with the second round (of bidding) which will really complete the whole facility.”
The city plans to bid on building the facility in two parts. The first phase, planned for the spring, will include the structure and underground components of the project. Later, once construction is underway, there will be a second bidding window with the interior elements of the project.
The city uses the at-risk construction method, often called CMAR, to build the structure. Unlike the “design, bid, build” method that the city uses for many other projects, the CMAR method allows the project owner to intervene immediately. This can also provide more flexibility in how projects are tendered and also means that for these larger projects, the city only deals with a general contractor instead of potentially acting as the general contractor itself. even.
“(In design, bid, build), you really won’t know how things are going until you get the bids in,” Feland said. “So there’s a lot of risk and there’s not a lot of opportunity to break the project into smaller, more meaningful components and provide more competition.”
Voigt covers government in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks.