Woodway has picked an engineering firm to evaluate what it would take to repurpose the old Woodway Family Center building as a senior center.
The next step in determining the old facility’s future comes as the city prepares to hold a grand opening from 10 a.m. to noon April 6 for the facility’s successor. Regardless of what happens with the old facility, the city has authorized programming for seniors at the new one.
The Woodway City Council interviewed two firms Monday that responded to the city’s solicitation for the study of the old facility, a block building from the 1970s with a metal frame and roof. KSA Engineers Inc. won out as the council’s pick over Terracon Consultants Inc., with Austin offices of each firm presenting proposals.
The next steps in the process are to have city staff negotiate KSA’s fee, and pending approval from the council, move forward with a contract, Mayor Amine Qourzal said.
People are also reading…
“We estimate the project timeline to be somewhere between 10 and 13 weeks for them to bring us their completed study with the anticipated costs,” Qourzal said.
When plans for the new Woodway Family Center building were being developed, with input from town hall meetings, the city was considering demolishing the old building or converting it to an open-sided pavilion that could cover a multi-use space, a playground, basketball courts or a small skate park.
In a process that started in 2019, the city also considered renovating the old Family Center building rather than building a new one. In 2021, shortly after the city sold $6.4 million in bonds to fund the new construction, then-Mayor Jane Kittner, an architect, said building new rather than renovating would mean a larger facility that would also be more energy-efficient and have less-costly maintenance needs. She said the old facility had electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning problems that would need to be addressed. It also was built to comply with now-outdated code requirements and before Americans with Disabilities Act accessibility requirements were in place.
For about a year now, a vocal group of Woodway senior citizens have called for the city to repurpose the old building as a senior center.
Some council members, including Qourzal, have said bringing the facility into compliance with modern standards would be prohibitively expensive, while others, including council members David Russell and Dave Keyston, have said renovations would be more affordable than the mayor believes.
Qourzal said in September that he believed renovating the old building to bring it into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and up to code could cost about $3 million. Before the council decided to build the new facility, a 2019 feasibility study found at the time that refurbishing the old one would have cost a minimum of $2 million.
In December, the city put out a request for proposals for firms to assess the facility, picking KSA on Monday.
The new building set to celebrate its grand opening next month cost about $6 million to build and is tucked between the old Family Center building and Woodway City Hall. Including the $6.4 million bond sale, the city had budgeted about $6.7 million for the project.
John W. Erwin General Contractor started work in late 2022. In addition to more space and amenities not available at the old facility, the new one features a large purple and green structure outside its entrance resembling a basketball net.
WATCH NOW: The Woodway Family Center could open its new building as soon as March, more than two years after the city sold bonds to fund the work.
