Northport Taps Utah Firm For Water Park, Sports Complex Study

NORTHPORT, AL. — The city of Northport on Friday moved one step closer to breaking ground on a proposed water park and sports complex as the City Council voted unanimously during a special called meeting to select a Utah-based firm to conduct a feasibility study for the project.

The decision to move forward came as the last action taken by the current Council, as three new council members and Mayor-Elect Bobby Herndon will be sworn in Monday night.

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Northport Development Coordinator Max Snyder told Patch the project had evolved to the point that leaders felt a feasibility study was needed to provide the best framework for moving forward with such a complex undertaking.

"It’ll help us determine how to right-size the project and then use that to come up with preliminary cost estimates," he said when asked of the projected cost of the project, which has yet to be determined.

Snyder said talks of an aquatic park, spurred by District 5 Councilman Jeff Hogg, were first started over eight months ago, eventually morphing to also include a sports complex. He then said a Request For Proposal (RFP) was issued on July 21 for firms interested in conducting the study, to which the city received 10 responses from across the country by the second week of August.

The city ultimately selected what officials viewed as the highest-rated of the 10 candidates, settling on Victus Advisors — a feasibility consultant firm out of Salt Lake City, Utah.

After receiving responses, Snyder said they were then rated by a four-member team consisting of himself, Hogg, District 3 Councilman John Hinton, and interim City Administrator Hardy McCollum. Each response, Snyder said, was then rated on four key criteria: Experience/qualifications, project approach/research methods, proposed timeline to complete the study, and fees.

Snyder also pointed out that Victus is led by a group of sports facility advisors with broad experience in recreation facilities, operations planning and sports tourism development.

"Victus was highest rated across the board," he said.

Once on-board for the study, Snyder said Victus will then partner with a nationally-recognized leader in aquatic park studies and development, Counsilman-Hunsaker, to analyze the water park component of the project.

Counsilman-Hunsaker has offices in Dallas, Los Angeles, Denver and St. Louis, with the firm working on projects in all 50 states and internationally.

Hogg told Patch following the decision that the city can now provide a plan of action to citizens concerning the multi-faceted project, in addition to giving insight as to how city leaders plan to make the final result possible.

"There’s a lot of different things that people have chimed in and said they wanted," Hogg said. "When you talk about aquatic parks or sports complexes, people say you need to have so many clover fields of sports complex, you need an indoor facility or water park, or are you going to have things for kids to do or will it be just big water slides for the older children? There has to be a happy balance between all of that and I think [a feasibility study] is the first step to get some in-depth analysis on what the city should do."

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