Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb has promised that his lakefront development plan won’t end up gathering dust on a shelf like those that came before it.
But drawing up that plan is turning out to be pricier than expected.
The mayor’s administration this week asked City Council to nearly double a $500,000 contract with Field Operations, the New York-based architecture firm consulting on the master plan. The contract expansion would cover a $260,000 cost overrun, plus another $140,000 of new work for a total of $900,000.
That cost overrun in particular stuck in council’s craw. Council members wanted to know: How could a consultant be allowed to bill City Hall for more than the contract allowed?
Finance Director Ahmed Abonamah took the heat from council. He said the city had paid “not a penny” more than the original $500,000 to the consultant so far. The administration needed council’s say-so before it could pay for the added expenses.
City Hall hired Field Operations to help design a new lakefront and to hold public events on those plans. The firm ended up taking on a larger role than expected advising on the proposed land bridge linking the lakefront with the rest of downtown, Abonamah said.
“As invoices came in, they were coming in higher than we anticipated, because the level of effort required by Field Operations was much more,” he said. “There’s no intentional effort to subvert council’s authority, but we ended up in a situation where the presumed budget of the project was not adequate and we only learned that after we started getting invoices.”
Council President Blaine Griffin decided to put a temporary pause on the request for a contract amendment. He made clear he wasn’t happy to be asked to sign off on a cost overrun after the fact.
“We’re basically just asked to write a $260,000 check that nobody even bothered to ask what our thoughts were,” Griffin said.
Field Operations took part in only one meeting, more than a year ago, in City Hall’s discussions with the Browns about renovating the lakefront stadium, Abonamah said. The firm will take multiple scenarios into account – including one without a lakefront football stadium, he said.
Anthony Hairston, the Ward 10 council member who chairs the Development, Planning and Sustainability committee, suggested legislation needed stronger safeguards against excessive costs.
Otherwise, “every vendor can lowball us and then come back and say, ‘Well, we need more money to continue to work,’” Hairston said. “They can lowball us, they can come back, ask for more money, and then what?”
Abonamah replied that cost overruns are going to happen in large, high-profile projects like the lakefront plan. But that doesn’t mean vendors should bid low and bill high.
“We certainly do not desire for vendors to come in and lowball us, only to see those prices go up,” he said. “Vendors who do that do it at the risk of never getting more business from us, because we like to have certainty about expenses with the work that we undertake.”
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