COMMENTARY | The Grants Pass City Council’s reconsideration of their vote to spend $150,000 more in federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) funds on 5 bus stop shelters (a total of over $530,000, for over $106,000 apiece) took three hours, possibly a record for a single agenda item. In the end, they didn’t kill the project or continue it; they kicked it to the next meeting, after voting to stop the bleeding and not request more money.
They didn’t vote to kill the project because we would have to pay at least $80,000, in money already spent, back to the feds. The Council couldn’t see making Grants Pass taxpayers pay $80,000 to protest federal inefficiency and save federal dollars.
The re-presentation of the issue included a lot more information about how the costs came to be so high. In 2007, the Grants Pass City Council voted to apply for CMAQ funds for this project under the Federal High Way Administration (FHWA). This required the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) to manage it as a highway project, following both federal and state highway construction guidelines-for rest areas. ODOT does “cost plus” contracts with engineering firms; they pick the “best” vendor for the project, and then pay their costs, plus profit. The City didn’t realize back then that they could apply through the Federal Transit Administration, which would have allowed the City to do the engineering and management in-house. So we got to vote to use federal money, but had no control over engineering costs.
But that was only part of the problem. The other part is that the basics of the project were not fully fleshed out before being submitted for preliminary engineering. The project was thought up by our Committee On Public Art (COPA), more as a vehicle for local artists than as bus shelters. There was even some thought at the time it was submitted to FHWA of building art into the design of the shelters, so the City hadn’t even settled on what kind of shelters we wanted-except that City staff were sure they didn’t want functional plexiglass cubes, lest street people sleep in them and cover them with graffiti.
Only $2,500 was budgeted for each shelter at that time for six artists to submit designs, which eventually ballooned into estimates amounting to $75,000 for constructing art for five. And we ended up with “shelter” designs that block only noonday sun and direct downpours, not wind or wind-blown rain, with no room for wheelchair users to get out of the rain.
So it wasn’t all federal and ODOT inefficiencies; it was also our vague design guidelines that were evolving as we went along-a sure recipe for time and cost overruns, especially when combined with a cost-plus contract managed by others. It took 5 years just to do the preliminary engineering, and it wasn’t all ODOT study requirements; it was our unformed proposal slowly taking form. That was our error, and we should go ahead and take the $80,000 hit, kill it, and start over from scratch with the FTA, thinking first about shelters, not art.
Video of the meeting is here: