Published: May 16, 2008 11:38 am            

Michael O'Connor: It may be expensive, but it’s not sneaky

One of the luxuries of being a newspaper is that we can take the time to understand complex issues and take the space to explain them.

Some limitations apply to that statement — amount of manpower, how much the personnel can accomplish in the time the company’s willing to pay for, the demand of other news on the space available and so on.

We jumped in on the special session of the Cleburne City Council because we weren’t there to cover it, not, we are convinced, because anything shady took place but because one of the many balls in the air was dropped from too few people trying to juggle too many responsibilities.

As discussions about the meeting swirled around the office, some of us thought a few things didn’t add up, and we wanted answers.

The first thing we did was to obtain a copy of the proceedings. City council meetings are recorded, and a written request will place a copy of the recording in the hands of anyone who requests it in writing. It’s a public record.

Listening to the recording clears up some of the questions, but not all of them. So, our managing editor invited the assistant city manager to the lion’s den to visit with some of us. He came and very patiently worked us through the history and the issues so we had more context to work with. By the time he left, our questions were answered and the concerns we had were allayed.

The purpose of the meeting was basically to authorize paying the architects to figure out how to add a theater complex to the civic center project. They had, in fact, already done some of the work, so in a sense, as I understand it, the action makes sure they are fairly compensated for their efforts.

But, as was noted in the council meeting, the fee is bound to the proposal, which makes a discussion of the proposal legitimate. So council members spent most of the meeting arguing the merits of a $10.5 million or so civic/convention/performing arts center.

Similarly, in our discussion with Adam Miles about the timing of the meeting, he spent a lot of time explaining the scope of the project so we could understand how city staff, the 4B board and the council arrived at the point of needing to make a decision that night.

One of the persistent questions heard, and we asked, was, “Why couldn’t the issue have waited one more week?” The simple answer is that waiting costs money. What we found out was the potential of how much money could be involved in one week.

Miles walked us through another project the city is involved with and explained that the construction manager at risk had come up with his guaranteed price based on initial discussions with his suppliers and subcontractors.

For the uninitiated a construction manager at risk bids a contract to construct something and then is pretty much stuck with that amount if awarded the contract. If he believes he can do the project for, say, $1 million, and the project winds up costing him $9.99 million, then he winds up making not near the profit he hoped for. That’s the at-risk part.

In the project we discussed, the contractor discovered that in the space of a few weeks, the firm bids for the project had changed enough that he would lose money on the contract. I did some dirty calculations and figured that if a similar situation was translated to the civic center, a week’s delay amounted to about a quarter of million dollars. (This was entirely my calculation, not Miles’.) That’s not exactly chump change.

Someone at the meeting accused the council of trying to sneak the civic center project through. But our best understanding from our discussions and from listening to the recording is that the process has been open to anyone who really wanted to know what was going on.

Well, you’re just siding with the city like you media types always do, someone is saying right now. If you want to believe that, go ahead. Nothing I say will dissuade you. But we’re not through asking questions, and if we don’t like the answers, we’ll tell you that as well. We haven’t forgotten our watchdog role. If we had, we never would have asked the questions to begin with.

Next: How does a $3 million civic center become a $10.5 million center?



Michael O’Connor can be reached editor@trcle.com.

        

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