The Moses Lake City Council on Tuesday tabled a decision to amend a contract for the firm designing a proposed 30,000-square-foot recreation center, after a member expressed concerns about the project’s costs.

Council member Karen Liebrecht asked to have the contract amendment pulled from the consent agenda at Tuesday’s council meeting, asking for the council to cast a vote on the decision.

The amendment would have increased the maximum amount allocated for The Driftmier Architects’ design fee from $451,249 to $821,602. The increase reflects the increased size of the project, which was first proposed in 2018 to be 14,000 square feet but was later more than doubled to 30,000 square feet.

“I just felt that the council needed a separate vote to expend that amount,” Liebrecht said Tuesday. “It is a significant amount of money, and I just want to make sure that we’re moving in the right direction and not spending that money and then backtracking later on.”

Liebrecht also more broadly questioned whether the city should take on the debt required to build the recreation center, which was last estimated to cost $11.4 million, with an annual debt service of $763,000.

“I think it’s a great project, one that the community would embrace, I just don’t think it’s the right time to do it,” Liebrecht said. “We have a significant debt that we are just on the edge of paying off for our civic center, and to put ourselves in that kind of indebtedness for 20 years is a concern.”

In an interview Wednesday, Liebrecht noted that the financial outlook for the civic center had also seemed encouraging when the city moved forward on that project, but it had been sidelined by the last recession. The city has proposed using lodging tax revenue to service the debt, including a proposed payment of over $250,000 in 2021 alone, but Liebrecht expressed concern at that revenue source.

“We rely on (lodging tax) money for part of this payment, and that’s a very volatile amount that can fluctuate year to year, especially if we have an economic downturn,” Liebrecht said. “I just want to be sure.”

The council voted in September to move forward with designing the 30,000-square-foot rec center, but it has not yet committed to actually constructing the building. After a brief discussion Tuesday, council member Dean Hankins made a motion to table the contract amendment until the next council meeting, when staff could give a final presentation on the project and the council would make a final decision.

“We have not agreed to even do the project yet, but we’re spending all this money on it,” Hankins said. “So instead of spending another $300-something-thousand, should we not wait until we can vote on whether we’re moving forward with the project at all?”

Municipal Services Director Fred Snoderly noted that Driftmier was about 30 days away from finishing design and being able to pull building permits. Snoderly added that the project’s costs would go up significantly if a permit was not pulled in the coming months, due to major changes in the state’s requirements for energy efficiency.

“The first of July, the building codes change, and a significant change that goes along with that is the energy code,” Snoderly said. “If we pull it prior to the first of July, even if we weren’t going to build it for a couple of years, we would still be under that umbrella as far as not having to comply with the new energy codes.”