By Joanna Miller
Construction Today Magazine
January 2007

In the early ’90s, Steven Westervelt and Steven Seams were two subcontractors working for the city of Coral Springs, Fla., on a tennis center. When someone with the city approached them and suggested they join forces to become a prime contractor instead of working for someone else, they took the idea and ran with it, forming Recreational Design & Construction Inc. Joe Cerrone was living across the street from Westervelt at the time and working as a commercial interior contractor, but when he heard about the new company focused on recreational projects, he was intrigued.

“It sounded like it would be fun to work in the park all day,” Cerrone, who now serves as president, says. “Shortly afterward, Mike Rozos also came on board to handle marketing.

” Today, the company works in the six eastern counties of southern Florida – Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Monroe, Martin and St. Lucie. It has also completed projects in the Orlando and Tampa areas on occasion. RDC takes on only design/build projects in the public sector market, specializing in parks and recreation. That includes aquatic facilities, tennis facilities sports field complexes and, of course, playgrounds. RDC has completed many other types of design/build projects such as community centers, gymnasiums, city halls, amphitheaters and maintenance facilities mostly for government agencies, school boards and universities.

“We have no consistent competitors,” Cerrone says. “We’ll compete with two or three design/build teams for an RFP or RLI, maybe as many as seven, but there’s no real trend. We’re not seeing the same team again and again. Our competitors are mostly school builders, large general contractors and developers – some really big contractors have tried to come in to the area to take a big job. We have no real, consistent competition in this niche.

“One of the reasons we get as much work as we do is that parks and recreation and sports have specialized requirements such as the pitch of the field, drainage of the fields so play can resume shortly after a heavy south Florida rain, how a ball plays, placement of the fields relative to the sun – very specific things,” he adds. “If you’re a school builder, you don’t have this expertise. People want to hire someone who’s done it before and isn’t learning on their project."

He says RDC focuses on relationships and service. “One of the ways we get our work is making our clients look good,” he says.

“We strive to overachieve making it easy for them to hire us again and again. This is a small niche industry. We can’t afford to have a bad job, everyone would know about it. That’s why we can’t afford to have even one.”

Grapeland Heights

RDC is working on the Grapeland Heights Park in Miami, a $32 million project in two phases. The first phase is a baseball complex that includes four baseball fields, a two-story concession/restroom/scorekeepers tower, dugouts, parking and sports lighting, batting cages and lots of landscaping.

Directly next to the complex is phase two – the city’s first water park. The water park will include four bodies of water – a 720-foot lazy river, with squirting water toys and small tipping buckets controlled by on lookers for added fun. A large water play pool for children five and older contains a $1.3 million piece of water play equipment specially designed for this project, the water playground has five levels five slides, water cannons and a 700-gallon tipping pineapple with water squirting out from every part.

A small play pool for children five and under has a $300,000 piece of play equipment also specially designed for this project; the smaller water playground has three levels and four smaller slides, water cannons, a 300-gallon tipping coconut with water squirting out from every part, and a resort pool for lounging and sun bathing. In addition, the company is designing and building the restroom, concession, ticket and other ancillary facilities all in the old Florida “cracker” style of architecture, as well as shade shelters, canopies, umbrellas and landscaping parking, site lighting and drainage.

The water park will incorporate a pirate theme based on a pirate girl character named Tina. “We’ve retained world-renowned artist Romero Britto to incorporate this theme throughout the water park,” Cerrone says. “There will be a 14-foot statue of Tina, and other playful elements throughout the playground.”

The baseball complex will be completed in February 2007 and the water park will be completed in January 2008.

Unique Considerations

Cerrone says recreational projects can be more difficult in Florida than in other states due to strict regulations. “No other state except maybe California has such stringent health department regulations on swimming pools,” he says.

“We have regulatory agencies that no one else has in the country. For example, the Florida building code in Dade and Monroe County code requires playground, shade shelters sports lighting and even back stop fencing to be able to withstand a wind load of 146 miles an hour. The equipment is not different in outward appearance, but it has to be engineered to a higher standard. The foundations are bigger and the connections are larger, so it doesn’t go away in a hurricane.”

He says local communities are putting increased emphasis on sports, recreation and leisure activities, which means more business for the company. “A couple of years ago, Broward County passed a $400 million bond issue,” he says. “Of that, $200 million went to purchase new land and $200 million went to upgrade existing facilities and build new parks on existing properties. People in south Florida are willing to spend money on quality of life issues like we’ve never seen before.

“Dade County just passed a $600 million bond issue,” he continues. “People are willing to spend their money and support bond issues that allow the local government to spend money on quality of life issues. People are making more money and our cost of living is relative to the rest of the country. It’s sunny here, baby boomers are getting older and looking to get out and enjoy life. There is an influx of people from all over the country coming in to enjoy our weather. Those are all contributing factors.”

With 42 employees, RDC can self-perform some aspects of its jobs, but typically subcontracts out as much as possible. Cerrone says it’s important to him that employees enjoy their jobs. “When I interview someone, I ask them, ‘I hope you enjoy what you do, or I’d rather you go somewhere else’,” Cerrone says.

The company plans to expand its operations throughout Florida and into the Caribbean in the next couple of years.

Jacobs Aquatic Center

RDC was selected to design/build a private aquatic facility in the Florida Keys that utilized the Myrtha system. The Jacobs Aquatic Center was funded by Barbara Jacobs, the wife of the owner of the Cleveland Indians baseball team who was living in the Keys at the time the Upper Keys community pool group was fund raising. The project was completely privately funded and the property was leased from Monroe County. RDC is the south Florida distributor of the Myrtha pool system.

The Myrtha system is a prefabricated stainless steel pool with a hard PVC lining adhered in the factory. The product has been around for more than 30 years in Europe it comes from a German patent with Italian fabrication.

There are many benefits to using this type of construction over conventional concrete pools. Mainly the pool comes with a 15-year warrantee, the company explains. The pools contained in the Jacobs Aquatic Center and the Grapeland projects are all being built with the Myrtha technology.

Copyright © 2007, Construction Today Magazine