In reaction to this blog's recent post about behind-schedule and over-budget improvements to the Alameda Civic Center Parking Garage, City Council members asked some follow-up questions before and during their most recent meeting.
In response to councilmember questions, city staff replied via email the day of the meeting:
In Fiscal Year 2023-24, Council approved $1,000,000 for garage improvements to enhance safety, security, and functionality. Design work extended longer than anticipated due to multiple plan revisions. Plans now meet or exceed code requirements including ADA improvements and infrastructure for future electric vehicle charging—both not part of the original estimate.
That is, the delays are due to the original scope expanding.
The expansion of scope is also one of the causes of the expanded expense:
Bid alternates, also not part of the original estimate, include repairing the vandalized Civic Center marquee and repainting exterior surfaces.
Staff make no mention of how the winning bidder likely forced out the initial lower bidder, but they do address the limitation of ultimately only receiving one responsive bid:
Staff continues seeking ways to expand bid competition, as seen in the recent Harbor Bay Business Park [Bus] Stops and Ferry Terminal Improvements Project that attracted seven bidders. Although the same advertisement and promotion was done for this project, fewer bidders responded likely due to the specialization and varied nature of the project scope.
The good news is that staff already have sufficient budget allocated to parking concerns overall to be able to surmount the delays and higher-than-expected bid:
Additional parking funds from previous appropriations allow us to award the full project, ensuring improvements in safety, security, accessibility, and functionality of the Civic Center Garage.
Staff also confirmed this blog's understanding that local business owners and employees are currently allowed to park all day in the surface lot between Central Ave and Alameda Ave:
For broader parking context, the Business District Parking Permit Program, established in the early 2000s, provides businesses with monthly permits for surface lots. Staff previously explored relocating permit holders to the garage but deferred further evaluation until security upgrades were completed.
Staff say that perhaps in the future, pending more intermediate steps, the Downtown Alameda Business Association (DABA) and the city may mutually agree to shift some of those all-day parkers to the garage, to free up the surface lots for short-term customers:
Modernizing agreements with DABA and WABA will allow the City
to transition to a virtual, license-plate-based system, reducing administrative burden and improving efficiency. This will also provide an opportunity to revisit the concept of relocating some permit activity to the garage.
At the Sept 2 meeting, staff added verbally in response to councilmember questions, that when a City of Alameda Public Works project tips over a $1mm threshold — as happened to the bids on this project — the city's Project Stabilization Agreement (PSA) with the Building and Trades Council of Alameda County comes into effect. This requires that any contractor who wins the bid must sign a letter of intent agreeing to meet the requirements of the city’s PSA. Staff said at the meeting that the eliminated bidder was not fully aware of the PSA and had not factored the required union wages mandated by the PSA into their bid. Their bid would still have likely been less than the winning bid, although by a somewhat smaller difference.
What should we take away from this project?
- Construction costs have been rapidly rising over the past ~5 years in California. It's an urgent problem to solve, but needs federal and state responses. Here at the local level, city leaders and department directors can only keep explaining this context (as they are doing on this project). Infrastructure improvements are still needed. The city needs to allocate sufficient capital and operating budgets for infrastructure, seek out appropriate new revenue sources, and continue to make fiscally prudent decisions to keep Alameda's streets, public facilities, and city-owned utilities in states of good repair.
- Where the city may have more flexibility is in the scoping of projects. Instead of one single project to perform assorted improvements to the parking structure, could this have gone out to bid as two or three projects? With more narrowly crafted scopes, each of those RFPs may have suited a wider range of firms' capabilities.
- Also in pursuit of more flexibility, could the city bring certain key capabilities in-house? An "FTE" (a full-time equivalent employee) is perhaps the most precious of resources within a public-sector organization like the City of Alameda. In the city's most recent budget negotiations, the only effective addition of FTE went to the Alameda Police Department (with Councilmember Tony Daysog still expressing disappointment that existing staff in other departments were not being laid off in order to further increase APD's FTE count). But FTEs aren't a zero-sum resource that only represents a cost on one side of the ledger. Particularly in the case of the city's Public Works and Planning departments, which also rely heavily on contractors and consultants, hiring an FTE for a certain skillset can save much more than their annual compensation in no-longer-needed external contracts. If chosen strategically, bringing certain skillsets in-house as FTEs can also then expand the city's pool of potential bidders for external projects, since the city now has additional capabilities to manage a wider range of potential vendors.
- Finally in terms of more flexibility, could city staff explore relaxing the requirement that construction contractors have five years' experience in California? Contractors certainly will need to follow requirements like the city's obligations to labor partners. But with Los Angeles rebuilding entire neighborhoods, as well as Olympic facilities, Alameda may benefit from being more open to construction firms newly arriving in California.
Pardon my language — that's the terminology I've heard used to describe this pattern when you ask a contractor for a quote, they size up your project, it's so small they really don't want to do it, but instead of simply saying "no thanks, buddy" they give you a quote for an almost offensively high amount. If you are a cost-insensitive customer or an inexperienced customer, you'll pay 'em. But if you do have a sense for market pricing, you'll have to decide whether to try to get more quotes, do the work yourself, or come up with a different sized or shaped project to bid out again.
Unfortunately the set of projects for which the city received this single, over-priced bid are the Safe Routes to Schools improvements long planned to fix up streets, curbs, and sidewalks immediately around Alameda's public schools. The SR2S grant funding comes with multiple constraints (even more than in the case of the city's General Fund being used for the parking garage). The staff report does propose a backup plan. Still, what a shame it is that only one contractor bid on that project and said, in effect, f*ck off to making it easier for students to walk and bike to their schools without being hit by parents in SUVs.
- Finally, the business owners of DABA should sit down and have a frank conversation about parking in downtown Alameda. Parking in the surface lot between Central and Alameda is stuck. It's stuck because of the monthly permit holders parking there all day. It's stuck because DABA and city staff came up with a fine plan — but a plan that has too many steps. Customers arriving by car in downtown Alameda don't care that there's a plan to improve the parking garage; a plan to activate the physically-installed-but-not-yet-activated street parking pay machines; a plan to politely ask DABA members to park in the garage after everything is finished; a plan to plan a permanent plan for Park Street and Oak Street in the year 2030. Customers arriving in downtown Alameda are simply tempted into circling that surface parking lot and don't know where to find a spot. Most of those solutions are taking time for valid reasons, and there's genuine value in plans. But in the meantime, the business owners of DABA should think hard about whether they care primarily about preserving their own priority parking, or see the advantages of immediately making that surface parking lot more readily available to their customers.