At a meeting attended by Bloomington mayor Kerry Thomson, the city’s redevelopment commission (RDC) voted unanimously (with one recusal) on Monday to reject all the construction bids for the Showers West renovation project.
The resolution was added to the RDC agenda late Friday.
The resolution stated that the bids for a total of around $12.7 million were responsive to the project design—which put both fire administration and police operations in the Showers West portion of the city hall building.
But as the wording of the resolution put it, the bids no longer meet “the vision and scope of the project.” That’s the project that Thomson’s predecessor, John Hamilton, had put in motion starting in the summer of 2022.
The change in vision for the project was consistent with the opposition from the police union, which has, from the time the idea was first floated, resisted the move—citing security concerns about Showers West, as well as entrance and egress issues.
Thomson told the RDC that the future of the Showers West project would be decided in “a collaborative process” with the city council to make sure that “whatever we do with police, in the end, it is in the interest of the future of public safety.”
Thomson added that she wants to make sure that “we really look at how we’re collaborating overall with public safety, as it’s being defined in the 21st century.”
[Updated on Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2024 at 2:30 p.m. The city of Bloomington communications director, Angela Van Rooy, issued a statement with a description of two slides that were used by the Showers West working group, showing cost comparisons of four alternatives for moving ahead with different components of the project. Here’s a link: .pdf of combined email message and two slides]
It will be a working group that Thomson has appointed to review the Showers West project that will help guide the future of the Showers West building, she said. That group includes: city councilmembers Isabel Piedmont-Smith and Isak Asare; Susan Yoon, who recently served on the board public safety; former mayor John Fernandez; and Liz Grenat, who is executive director of the Community Justice and Mediation Center (CJAM). The group has met at least twice already.
Based on Thomson’s Monday remarks, the fire department’s administration will likely find a home in Showers West, with some kind of modest renovation to the space that it will occupy in the building. City attorney Larry Allen responded to a B Square question after Monday’s meeting by saying that while it’s a likely scenario, it is “not fully decided.”
In any event, the idea of renovating the 110-year-old brick furniture factory building into a police station sounds like it’s off the table. Thomson called that part of the project “building what amounts to an entirely new building within a building ”
In her remarks addressing the RDC, Thomson ticked through other public safety projects, instead of a Showers West police station, that would be moving forward with use of the proceeds resulting from a public safety bond. The city council approved up to a $29.5-million bond issuance in December 2022. Those bonds sold for just a little over $27.1 million, according to then-corporation counsel Beth Cate, speaking at a mid-December board of public works meeting.
One of the projects now moving ahead is the design and reconstruction and renovation of Fire Station 1 downtown, which was damaged in the Kirkwood Flood of 2021. The construction work on Station 1 has already started, with construction bid awards that totaled around $4.5 million.
While the Hamilton administration had been inclined to prioritize the Showers West renovations—ahead of the Fire Station 3 remodel and the construction of a fire training and logistics center—Thomson said on Monday that she is looking to move the fire department projects ahead.
In the budget estimates floated by the Hamilton administration in 2022, the Fire Station 3 remodel was pegged at $2.5 million, and a new fire training and logistics center was estimated at another $2.5 million. Adding those projects to the Station 1 reconstruction ($4.5 million) and the Showers West purchase price ($8.75 million) brings the total cost of public safety projects that are moving forward, and are to be paid out of the bond proceeds, to at least $18.25 million.
On top of the fire department projects comes the cost of payouts for the early termination of leases for some Showers West tenants, and the loss of rental income from those tenants.
All those factors led Thomson to tell RDC members on Monday about the Showers West project: “It became very clear that we just don’t have funding to do it at this time.”
Thomson said that in order to give contractors certainty, she was asking that all the bids be rejected.
The total of the bids that would have been awarded came to around $12.7 million. The winning bids, which included a base plus some additional money for an IT room were: SCS Construction Services, Inc. (general trades) for $4,623,400; Multicraft Fire Protection (fire protection) for $310,500; Harrell-Fish Inc (mechanical and plumbing) for $4,128,000; and Cassady Electric (electric) for $3,655,900.
Recusing himself from discussion and the vote on Monday was Randy Cassady, whose firm was the low bidder for the electrical work. That made for the 4–0 vote, on the five-member RDC, to reject all of the bids for Showers West construction work.
Responding to a B Square question after the RDC meeting about the federal regulations that require bond proceeds to be spent on their stated purpose within a certain time frame, city attorney Larry Allen pointed to the purchase of the Showers West portion of the building and the Fire Station 1 work as already counting towards that requirement.
At Monday’s RDC meeting, Thomson said that the work that real estate broker Chris Cockerham had been doing to negotiate the early termination of Showers West tenant leases, would be put on hold. ”The tenants that are left really want to remain there,” Thomson said. She added, “As long as the city is going through a discernment process about what we’re putting in Showers West, we would like to continue to house them.”
Some, but not all, of the tenants who have already agreed to exit early were leasing space that had been earmarked for a fire department move-in after renovation. Fitting that description was the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra’s original lease was set to terminate at the end of this year.
Not in the footprint of Showers West that had been earmarked for the fire department was the space that GP Strategies was leasing, Allen told The B Square.
At its special meeting last week, the RDC approved the early lease termination for GP Strategies— which meant foregoing about $65,000 in repayment for a build-out that had been done by the previous landlord, CFC Properties. Under the terms of the lease for GP Strategies it would have naturally terminated at the end of this year. Allen said that GP Strategies had already been looking for a different space in town.
At last week’s special RDC meeting, Aaron West, who is executive director of the Bloomington office for GP Strategies, told The B Square the likely new home for the company was in Fountain Square on the south side of Kirkwood across from the county courthouse.
When it comes to leases, the city of Bloomington’s fire department could find itself on the other end of the stick for the 6,000 square feet of space that it currently rents from Bloomington Properties Trust on S. McIntire Drive on the western edge of town. The fire department uses the space for storage and maintenance of fire department equipment, but it also includes some administrative offices and training/conference space. In 2020, the fire department signed a 5-year lease for the property.
But the property has now been put on the market for $2.2 million.
That’s something Thomson mentioned at Monday’s RDC meeting, in the context of the need to move ahead with a design and construction of the fire department’s own fire logistics and training facility. Thomson put it like this: “The place where the fire logistics is currently housed has been put on the market. So we are about to be unhoused potentially at the fire logistics center.”
The bids did meet “the vision and scope of the project”. The scope of the project has changed rendering the bids moot. The bidders bid on the vision and scope as defined. The response to the bidders implies that they somehow failed to meet the intent of the project and were rejected which isn’t what happened.
Clearly, you have a reading comprehension problem. The article says the bids “NO LONGER” meet the vision and scope of the project, which implies, inherently, that the vision and scope have changed. Reading comprehension is usually taught in elementary school, in case you need a refresher course.
You don’t have to be mean or insulting. Rick said their original bids met the scope and vision as defined which is true
i still don’t have a strong opinion on what should be done with the police department. but as i recall, the difficulty in selecting more cost-effective police HQ building options was a big part of the decision to put it in showers west. i don’t know how to weigh the different estimates but i sure look forward to seeing how mayor Thomson actually spends that money.
i guess i’m just anxiously awaiting an end to the campaign. candidate Thomson never said anything concrete, but she did often frame a question in a negative tone. and here in what seems like her first major decision, we have still only seen the negative tone. i know she will put something forward but *still* waiting to learn how she actually makes decisions is — hahah really, i just don’t like it. it’s fine.
woo! i stand corrected. for all i know, the numbers even work out. i guess they are envisioning a much less significant expansion to the existing BPD building than hamilton presented, because they can cheaply put fire admin in the existing generic office space of showers west?