Project Update: A New Aquatic Center And John Davis Rec Center

The City of Dalton is engaged in a number of improvement projects around town and from time to time, daltonga.gov will be posting updates on these projects so you can stay in the know on what’s going on around town. Today, we’re updating the Aquatic Center project. The project was announced to the public in 2021 and the original plan was to build the new Aquatic Center on a site near the Dalton Mall on Walnut Avenue. However, that plan has changed and now the center will be built at the southeast corner of the James Brown Park campus at the John Davis Recreation Center. The building will be built near the intersection of Avenue C and Mitchell Street. The entire park campus is also part of this project update, as renovations to the John Davis Recreation Center at the site are also being planned for the coming year. City leaders believe that the remade park campus will be a highlight of the Parks and Recreation Department. Here’s the update:

If you want to swim in Dalton, you’d better be fast.

Dalton High School has two state championships in swimming and diving in the past five years, adding second and third place finishes in the years following their 2018 and 2020 titles.

The Catamounts aren’t the only standout swimmers, though, as all four high schools in the Whitfield County area have swimming and diving programs. The area is also home to the Carpet Capital Aquatics Club serving hundreds of swimmers from youth all the way through secondary school.

There are only two competition-sized pools available in the county, though, making competition for practice time a challenge. And hosting major competitions in Dalton is a no-go with only the outdoor pool at the John Davis Recreation Center and an indoor pool at Dalton High. But with work set to begin later this year on a new Aquatic Center for the Dalton Parks and Recreation Department that’s all about to change.

A state-of-the-art aquatic facility

The plan is for the new center to feature a 50-meter competition pool as well as a separate multipurpose pool. The facility will include spectator seating for between 900 and 1,000 spectators as well as a separate seating area with approximately 500 seats for swimmers. The vision is for the center to be able to support not just the local swim community but also to host regional USA Swimming events.

“We have heard from the public a concern over the lack of parking at this site, but we already understand that we’re going to be able to deliver more parking than we would have had title to over at the mall site,” said city administrator Andrew Parker. “We will have about 300 parking spaces just at the off-street parking at the Aquatic Center in addition to on-street parking that’s also available. With this campus now there's an opportunity, with sidewalk between the aquatic center and the John Davis and the Ron Nix soccer complex there’s enough parking that could support large regional swim meets at this campus.”

And more than just being a place for competitions, the new Aquatic Center will also be a place the entire community can use for exercise and recreation.

“I’ve just recently started to dig into what all can be offered,” said Caitlin Sharpe, the new director of the Parks and Recreation Department. “But there’s a great deal of opportunity for more morning aquatic classes, swim lessons during the day, therapeutic classes… I just think that it proves that a lot of people in the community are excited to have something that’s going to be accessible.”

Dalton’s swimmers should be able to go very fast in the new pool. The design will feature a Myrtha stainless steel pool liner, technology that makes for a very “fast pool.”

“It’s the fastest pool technology and this is what you’d see even in the Olympics,” said Parker. “The competition swimmers really like it because their fastest times are typically in a Myrtha pool environment.”

The facility will also feature an advanced air exchanger system that will complete a number of complete air exchanges with the outside air to make the air environment more comfortable – a common complaint from swimmers and spectators alike at other older aquatic facilities is that chlorine in the air can cause burning eyes and respiratory discomfort.

“The neat thing about our center is that we’re designing the components in the facility in a first-class nature,” said Parker of the effort to study other aquatic centers around the southeast to learn what works well and what can be improved.

A remade John Davis Center

City leaders held a meeting earlier this month with KRH Architects and also Gregg Sims Architect to discuss plans for the Aquatic Center and also renovations to the overall John Davis Community Center campus. KRH is under contract to develop the plan for the Aquatic Center building and Gregg Sims is handling renovation plans for the rec center.

“There was a desire since the contracts are taking place concurrently to look at what opportunities we have to deliver the best recreational experience possible to the public given that both would now be on the same campus,” said Parker. “We were able to talk about the programming needs of each facility – what programming needs were common between both facilities, the Aquatic Center and the John Davis renovation – so we could make decisions now, early in the design phase, to not only deliver the best recreational experience to the public but also the most streamlined overhead and management approach to take given that they’ll both be on the same campus.”

The vision for the renovated John Davis Rec Center includes soccer, basketball, and swimming as well as general recreation and the possibility of meeting and event hosting. The skate park on the campus will also remain in place.

“For soccer, we’ve got the Ron Nix soccer complex with two artificial turf fields. We will definitely be having some form of basketball, we are looking at if we will have enough room to house two gyms, but we will definitely have at least one gym. And obviously now we’ll have swimming,” Parker said of the plans for the campus.  “We’re also looking at some of the common spaces, how we will use those. There’s a creek that bisects the campus, the two project sites, and we envision the opportunity for the public to walk on the campus with sidewalk connections and a pedestrian bridge over the creek to get from one part of the campus to the other.”

“We have some very neat opportunities for assembly space at the John Davis Center that have been underutilized the last decade,” Parker continued. “For example, up above the administrative offices there’s a large conference room that in the past supported many civic club meetings and birthday parties in the community, it’s got an amazing view out to Fort Mountain and Grassy Mountain to the east and overlooking the terrace park to the west where there are picnic tables and all that, so it’s a beautiful assembly space. It’s going to be fully ADA compliant with an elevator and we hope to have a kitchenette put into the space to support food service and things like that for birthday party rentals and things like that.”

“The staff, and myself, we’re extremely excited,” Caitlin Sharpe said of the renovations to the rec building and the park campus as a whole. “Just to be able to watch a real renovation take place of almost the whole campus and to see it transformed into more of a leisure park where people are going to come… it’s going to be neat. I hope to see a lot more visitors when that happens.”  

“John Davis has always been the headquarters for Dalton Parks and Recreation, but in the last ten years or so it’s certainly been underutilized,” Parker said. “We think now with the Aquatic Center and just totally renovating and rehabbing the center it has an opportunity to be a first-class headquarters for our parks and rec system and for that we’re very excited about that.”

A different approach to project delivery

To control costs on the Aquatic Center project and to deliver the project on-time, city leaders are taking an innovative approach to the process. The City is currently accepting bid proposals for general contractors to serve as the “Construction Manager At-Risk” to oversee the project from the design phase through completion of construction. Instead of hiring a general contractor to build once the designs are already complete, Dalton is bringing the contractor in from the beginning.

“Because the Aquatic Center by its very nature has so many specialty components associated with the pool, associated with the support spaces of the pool, the equipment, the building materials in general, we’re trying to keep the construction costs controlled,” Parker said. “Typically, the project would have the architect complete a set of plans without having a contractor on board in the input process for how things are specifically designed, the materials that are used, so until bid day [for contractors] you don’t understand what the actual costs of construction will be. You have engineers estimates and architects estimates to help understand what you think it would be, but in this case the budget is over $20 million, we don’t want this project on bid day to go way over budget because of the building components that we selected in the design phase.”

“By having the general contractor involved from the very beginning, we’ll be able to have real time information on how to deliver the project on-time sourcing the materials that are available to us right now,” he continued, noting that lead times for building materials have been longer recently due to supply chain issues. “The process will still be competitive, we are required by state law to make sure the process remains competitive in terms of when we’re sourcing plumbing or pool equipment, pool construction, the general contractor will still have to secure competitive quotes from those specialty contractors. But we hope the process will help us to get the site work started early, because the site plans can be developed a little bit quicker.”

The current timeline for the project has site work for the Aquatic Center beginning sometime in mid-June, with construction of the facility beginning later in the summer in August. Final completion for the facility is expected sometime in January 2024.

The timeline for the John Davis Recreation Center is shorter. The project is in the design phase for the next few months, and construction is expected to take approximately 12 months. The hope is for the project to be completed sometime in the summer of 2023.