Old B Square

Monroe Convention Center expansion: End of 2026 eyed for finish, $4.4M contract with architect OK’d

The image, from Monroe County’s property lookup system, is looking eastward from the existing convention center, which is outlined in red.

On Wednesday, a possibly 60,000-square-foot expansion of the Monroe Convention Center took a big step forward, as contracts with the architect and construction manager were approved by the Monroe County capital improvement board (CIB).

The end of 2026 is the target date spelled out in this latest set of documents approved by the CIB.

The location of the new building is planned for across College Avenue, that is, east of the current facility, which stands at the southwest corner of 3rd Street and College Avenue.

Renovation of the existing 40,000-square-foot facility is set to start when the new construction is complete. That renovation will take about six months.

At its regular monthly meeting on Wednesday, the two big agenda items were a $4.4-million contract with architect Schmidt Associates, and a nearly $1-million contract with construction manager Weddle Bros. Both were approved on unanimous votes of the seven-member board.

When the CIB started its work in fall 2023, after being established in the summer of that year, an early decision was made to keep Schmidt Associates as the architect. Schmidt had been on board for preliminary design work since 2018, before the project was paused due to political wrangling, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The decision to hire Weddle Bros. as the construction manager as contractor was made more recently, after a competitive bidding process.

The $4.4-million contract with Schmidt Associates includes about $4 million for basic design services. That’s based on the assumption of a hard construction cost of $52 million and fee equal to 7.7 percent.

The exact construction cost is not yet known, but the contract uses a sliding scale, where the percentage for the fee goes down as the hard construction cost goes up. Schmidt Associates will still be paid more, the more the construction costs, but it’s not as much more, as it would be under a flat percentage arrangement.

Assuming a $52-million hard construction cost means that the 1.9 percent fee for Weddle Bros. works out to about $988,000.

One of the advantages of hiring a construction manager as contractor is that the construction manager accepts some of the risk related to cost. The mechanism used to offload some of the CIB’s risk to the construction manager is a guaranteed maximum price (GMP).

At Wednesday’s meeting, CIB member Adam Thies scrutinized the timeline, which includes the final GMP. Thies was concerned that the GMP would be required from Weddle Bros. only after all the construction bids were in.

Thies wanted to incentivise the construction manager to keep costs down, by getting a GMP before all construction bids were in. That would possibly mean going back to get more bidders and really generate the bid market that would be needed for the project, Thies said. Responding to Thies was Deb Kunce, with JS Held, which is the CIB’s project manager. Kunce told Thies, “We can definitely take that under advisement.”

Getting a mention at Wednesday’s meeting was the fact that the CIB’s budget for 2024 is being revised. That request will be reviewed by the FABTAC (food and beverage tax advisory commission) and then by Bloomington’s city council, probably sometime in August. It’s the city’s share of the countywide food and beverage tax that will pay for the convention center expansion.

The money to pay for the architect and construction manager contracts is not a part of this year’s CIB budget and won’t appear in the CIB’s 2025 budget, either. That’s because there are city of Bloomington purchase orders for such work, dating back to 2019, but which are still open.

In 2019, the Bloomington city council requested that the FABTAC (food and beverage tax advisory commission) review a $6.25 million expenditure of food and beverage tax revenue. After getting an approval from the FABTAC, the council appropriated the money.

At that time, the city signed a $4.1-million contract with Schmidt Associates for design work on the expansion and another $1.5-million contract for parking garage design work.

Those contracts include handwritten purchase order numbers. The purchase order for the parking garage design is being closed out, because the expansion project does not itself include a parking garage.

A parking garage could be constructed as a part of the hotel for which the CIB is soliciting proposals. City-owned land, like the former Bunger & Robertson property at 4th Street and College Avenue could be used, but approval from Bloomington’s city council would be required.

Based on a recent council-adopted letter to the CIB , the council could balk at the construction of a parking deck there, depending on how the real estate deal is structured. From the letter: “The Council prefers not to use public funds to subsidize any new parking for the Project.”

At its Wednesday meeting, the CIB got an update on the process for soliciting proposals from a hotelier. Here’s what that schedule looks like:

Monroe Convention Center Hotel