Imminent interlocal accord gives boost to convention center expansion, but project timeline looks longer

The likely signing of a key agreement by the end of February has given a little bit of impetus to the plan to expand the Monroe Convention Center at 2nd 3rd Street and College Avenue.

But the aggressive timeline that Monroe County’s capital improvement board (CIB) had hoped to follow looks like it will probably be dialed back a bit. An expanded facility that is ready to host events by the end of 2026 may not be realistic.

The bright spot of news that CIB members got to chew on at their Wednesday meeting was the previous evening’s unanimous ratification of an interlocal agreement by the Monroe County council, which is one of the four parties to the accord.

The other three parties are the Monroe County commissioners, the Bloomington city council, and the mayor. The agreement is expected to appear on the agenda for county commissioner on Feb. 21, followed by a possible adoption by the city council the following week, on Feb. 28.

Bloomington mayor Kerry Thomson told The B Square on Tuesday that if the agreement on the county council’s agenda was the same one that she had seen most recently, she is in support of it.

The current version of the interlocal that is now making the approval rounds has been revised since the city council and the mayor approved it last year. That’s why the city council and the mayor will need to re-approve it.

At their December meeting, CIB members  had been looking at a potential timeline that included opening an expansion for business in late 2026.

But at Wednesday’s meeting, it was apparent that even if the CIB is making progress on selecting a construction manager, owner’s representative, and retaining an architect, it’s not as fast as the timeline draft provided by Schmidt Associates in December. Schmidt is the architectural firm that did the preliminary conceptual design work in 2019 and before.

On Wednesday, the CIB took action on retaining Schmidt to update the Phase 1 work the firm had done five years ago. The motion the board approved was to pay Schmidt $49,000 for the update to their previous work. From the time that Schmidt starts that work, it is expected to take 60 days to complete that task.

In order to pay Schmidt for its work, the interlocal agreement will need final approval from all parties, which will free up the $250,000 that has been appropriated in the city of Bloomington’s 2024 budget for the CIB’s activity.

Already working for the CIB, with the understanding that they will eventually be paid for their effort, are Bunger & Robertson attorney Jim Whitlatch as legal counsel and former Bloomington controller Jeff Underwood as controller.

In other action on Wednesday, the CIB voted to pause their selection process of a construction manager at risk for the project, awaiting the outcome of the update to the work by Schmidt Associates. Giving an update on the topic to the full CIB from a Monday committee meeting was CIB member Adam Thies. He said that six responses had been received to the RFQ (request for proposals) that the CIB had issued.

Thies called all six “major and reputable firms that do work in the state of Indiana.” From that Thies concluded, “It means we have some interest in the marketplace.”

Also on Wednesday, the CIB voted to follow the committee’s recommendation to start scheduling interviews for an owner’s rep. Reporting on that topic from the committee was CIB member Doug Bruce. He said there had been four respondents to the RFQ that the CIB had issued for an owner’s rep. The committee recommended winnowing the four down to two firms: JS Held and Veridus.

The CIB voted to move ahead with setting interviews for the two firms starting the week of March 4.

Presenting the CIB with a rough idea of some numbers for estimating the project budget and revenues from the one-percent food and beverage tax was CIB controller Jeff Underwood.

Based on the annual revenues to the city of Bloomington from the tax, which has been collected since 2018, Underwood put the bonding capacity based on the tax revenue somewhere between $37 million and $59 million.

That stacked up against an estimated total project cost of around $79 million—based on a scenario where the largest size expansion that was contemplated five years ago is actually built, and the assumption that construction costs have increased by 50 percent. Thies cautioned against considering the numbers presented by Underwood as actual budget numbers, saying they were just for illustrational purposes.

As a specific example, Thies noted that in the table Underwood presented, an additional 20,000 square feet is pegged at a cost of $20 million—which is $1,000 per square foot. “That’s extraordinarily expensive,” Thies said. He added, “We may not be doing a building that’s $1,000 per square foot—I would kind of hope not.” Thies said he would not take away specific numbers from the table as indicative of the project budget.

Underwood gave the current fund balance for Bloomington’s share of the food and beverage tax as around $17 million.

The revised interlocal agreement that is expected to have approval from all four parties by month’s end got approval from the Monroe County council on Tuesday night. Council president Trent Deckard’s remarks summed up the general sentiment in the room: “I am excited to see this go tonight like a rocket ship out that dome.” Deckard continued, “And I hope that that rocket ship does what councilor [Peter] Iverson said—it strengthens the core of this town, this city.” Deckard added, “How that core goes, so goes the county.”

One of the specific terms of an earlier version of the interlocal agreement, which was adopted by the Bloomington city council and the mayor last year, outlined the way appointments to the convention and visitors commission (CVC) would be handled.

In March of 2020, appointments to the CVC—as well as to the capital improvement board (CIB)—were a significant topic of dispute that blocked progress on the whole convention center expansion project. By mid-2022, then-Bloomington mayor John Hamilton had even walked back the city’s support for a CIB as the governance structure.

The question came to a head when the city council in late 2022 passed a resolution of support for the idea of a CIB to govern the convention center expansion.

Hamilton vetoed the resolution, which was then overridden by the council as one of its first actions of 2023.

When the county board of commissioners in July of 2023 enacted an ordinance to establish a CIB under state law, that settled the question of how the CIB appointments would be made.

Not settled by the CIB ordinance was the question of how the CVC appointments would be made or exactly how the downtown real estate that is owned by the city and county governments would factor into the convention center expansion. The previous interlocal agreement covered not just real estate, but also CVC appointments.

The way CVC appointments are made is laid out in state law.  Under state law, two of the five seats are appointed by the county commissioners and the remaining three seats are appointed by the county council.

So an interlocal agreement signed between city and county governments could not delegate a statutory duty of county elected officials to some city entity.

But in the previous version of the interlocal agreement, the county council’s CVC appointments came with a wrinkle. Under the previous version of the interlocal, the county council had to consider the recommendations for appointments that were made by the city council and in one case was required to select one of the four suggestions made by the city council.

It was that clause of the previous version that made the county council reluctant to sign off on the interlocal agreement. The revised version does not prescribe any role for the city in what are supposed to be appointments by the county government under state law.

As county councilor Geoff McKim described the revised version of the interlocal agreement on Tuesday night: “The county does what the county is statutorily required and authorized to do, and the city does what the city is statutorily authorized and required to do.” McKim added, “So I look forward to voting yes on this and hope that the board of commissioners and city council will as well.”