The Bloomington City Council narrowly approved moving forward with a $750,000 Downtown Streetscape Project intended to develop a conceptual design to be integrated into all future projects downtown. The vote was 5 – 4 with council members, Nick Becker, Donna Boelyn, Shelia Montney and Grant Walsh dissenting.
In the end Council Member Tom Crumpler appeared to cast the decisive vote carrying the motion. Crumpler told Cities 92.9 after the meeting, “I was skeptical at first. It’s a lot of money to invest. It’s a huge project and candidly, (there is) a good chance that most of us will probably be off the council before it is realized.”
Crumpler continued, “As I said in my statement … I spoke to business community leaders, other council members and really felt like in the end I had to make a decision for the future of Bloomington. I think this council has taken care of the roads and the infrastructure in a real concrete way. But this was something I think is going to help us think about what this community could look like in the future.”
“I didn’t take this decision lightly. I said in my comments that I feel like in the end it was the right decision for us,” he added.
Before voting on the motion dissenting council members offered an amendment to the motion. Using his 80-20 rule Becker offered a motion that would would send the matter back to staff to investigate spending $150,000 for the conceptual design study. He also wanted the study to be completed in six weeks instead of 12 months.
Montney seconded the motion expressing her opinion that the city could rely on the previous planning studies already done.
Boelyn made a friendly motion that was accepted to amend the amendment to require that staff report their findings back next month.
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City Engineer Craig Shonkwiler explained that the proposed conceptual design would take the design phase for for the entire downtown streetscape project to the 20% point. He explained that typically the design cost of a project is roughly 10% of the total cost.
20% of a $30 million project would be $3 million. 20% 0f $3 million is $600,000. Therefore the $750,000 fee for the proposed conceptual design is in the right ballpark.
Shonkwiler also explained then when you do a conceptual design like this (the equivalent of doing what the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) calls a phase one design) it enables the phase 2 design (completed design plans for construction) to be done much quicker and some time is gained there.
Shonkwiler emphasized that compressing the time allowed to design plans increases risk and costs.
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Chris Stritzel, the Project Principal for CMT pointed out that rushing plans often results in a contractor needing to file more change order requests for additional funds and that is what increases project costs.
Stritzel also reminded council they expressed a desire to continue public involvement throughout the design process and advised them that a reduced scope with a compressed time frame would not allow for that.
On past projects going through these steps has allowed CMT to help clients find grant money according to Stritzel who said on one recent project the firm helped the client get a $24 million grant.
Stritzel emphasized that though the proposed project has been called a planning study, it’s really not, it’s preliminary design.
Council member Molly Ward used the analogy of her old house saying some of the older parts of town have staying power because they weren’t slapped into place. She reminded everyone of the old carpenter adage, “Measure twice and cut once.”
Council member Julie Emig reiterated that the conceptual design study sets the stage for incremental final design and told everyone that the people that have been working on this know their business.
The amendment failed 3 – 6 with Becker, Montney and Walsh voting for it.
