Council voted to authorize the $12 million contract for the Music Center Building Package on Monday. To date there has been no public discussion that shows council members have seen or understand the financial impact to the city. The Music…
I attended the admin meeting last night also and was surprised as to how far along the city is with going forward with this Music Center project. They have approved $100K to do their due diligence, have 3 contracts ready to be signed for various areas of the study being conducted, and an $18 million dollar price tag on the project. They were very pleased with the comments and thoughts from the 18 or so people who actually know something about this as they sit on these different committees within the city. Seems like a small number of people to decide for the balance of the community who will not have the opportunity to ask questions unless they happen to attend one of the three committee meetings. Look for more to come in the followup meetings and keep checking the council agenda items for this issue. I'm sure it will get interesting.
City Meeting
By Janell,
posted
I, for one, will be attending these meeting on a more regular basis!
Go figure! I really wanted to be there tonight. I wanted to hear all this for myself. I have a ton of questions. I've contacted most outside venue mgrs that are within 3 hours of Dayton. I have some numbers questions for them. Have they really done their homework? At last month's meeting the sales pitch sounded like Oz was about to appear. It's not appearing as a "we the people" government anymore.
Tom captured the minutes of the meeting with great detail. There was a lot of information and discussion on the subject of the Music Center. Council and staff have appeared to be doing there due diligence and even wanting to take additional steps for another Validation Study. This seems to make good sense for an outside party to validate much of the data already being collected in the other studies the city has requested.
I also thought Ms. Dudley had a good point like Tom mentioned about a certification to this companies work being provided as a product of the Validation Study.
My thought was to get projects very similar to the Music Center that this company CSL worked with and get with the city representatives, question them on how accurate the analysis was in the various areas they looked at. Ask these cities whether or not they feel the study was beneficial, how accurate were thier projection/forecasts, did they get the results as CSL thought they would.
Another area that I did not understand completely was how this project is to be funded. It has been stated that TIF money can be used and will be enough to fund the project. Tonight the comment about using bonds and grants as a funding method. These comments added some confusion to the funding issue.
I was glad to hear that staff wanted some additional time 30-45 days to continue to look into all areas of concern before making a decision, of course it will cost a bit more money which will be covered by money that is available for use and already budgeted ($40K max). There was also discussion of additional meetings for further discussions within various city committee meetings where the public is encouraged to attend and comment. Not sure how many folks attend these meetings, I would question the public awareness, but comments are being reported as mostly positive.
I've broken out some of the Mar 14, 2013 Music Center presentation into easy viewing
Meeting notes:
The City is hiring Ken Conaway LLC as the project manager for the Music Center. The contract with Ken Conaway LLC is to provide up to 40 hours a week in project management services and additional time for an assistant. This business was created by Mr. Conaway. Mr. Conaway has worked with city council previously. He managed the construction of the Aquatic Center as an employee of 201 LLC. Mr. Conaway is also the owner of Dry Run LLC. The city just extended the $90,000 a year no bid contract they awarded to Dry Run LLC. This contract allows Dry Run LLC to manage the $65,000 of man hours the YMCA contributes to maintaining the landscaping around the Recreation Center in addition to the contracted award price. Mr. Conaway also speaks at council meetings as a representative of the Carriage Trails Developer and appears to still maintain an active role managing that effort.
The Music Center Project manager, Mr. Conaway, talked about the dynamics of the three main development companies that will be involved in the project: GBBN, MKSK and ME. Those dynamics are still being worked out. He also indicate prep work such as environmental studies will begin soon.
A draft budget for the Music Center project was available to council members at the meeting. This document was not handed out or in the read ahead. I'm guessing it won't be in the minutes either. There was no meaningful discussion on the budget.
- GoodSports Economic Development Agreement
City staff is in constant contact with GoodSports. Representatives of this company are suppose to travel to Huber next week to look at the site and meet with city staff. Expectation is this company will try to build at about the same aggressive schedule as the city. This is expected to result in better better deals for construction services. The company has also indicated they are talking with other associates about also bringing their businesses to the city.
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Check this out for yourself! goodsportsenterprises.com Click on "About Us" then scroll down to "Executive Summary". This will appear on the left side of the page. This is a PDF file and has some interesting reading. Check out page 3; The Municipal Contributions. Any thoughts on this?
April 16, 2013 Administration Meeting agenda items.
Music Center There are five proposals being requested to start the design work on the music center. Opening the first couple and we see they are extensive documents that deserve more attention and their own write-up. Please open and review. I appreciate your posting of your review and thoughts. One of the first things I see is that the number of acres stated in the MKSK proposal is +/- 32 this is more than what we've seen previously.
MKSK Proposal - RE: Professional Design Services for ‘The Heights’ Design Standards and Huber Heights Music Center Schematic Design through Construction Administration. MKSK# c13518
The Music Center project manager started the meeting showing council some renderings (pictures) of some of the architectural features. I missed the absolute beginning of the presentation so I wasn't in the meeting when it was stated definitively but I gather from subsequent comments that the plan is to lower the floor below the natural surface. I believe this is being done to lower the noise impact both to the public and the music center. As one of our readers suggested the noise from the highway is a concern. The developers realize this as well and are planning to build a concrete barrier between the highway and the music center. This concrete barrier will be built with aesthetics in mind as well.
The acoustic engineer for the project went out to the PNC to do noise level measurements. From his calculations if there were nothing in between the Music Center and the nearest houses to the Music Center then the noise level from the Huber Height Music center would be about 70 to 75 decibels at their porches. This equates to about as noisy as people set their volume when they watch TV or a vacuum cleaner.
The request for qualifications for the building package was sent out and there were 5 respondents. All 5 respondents were considered qualified to bid on this portion of the project. The report by the project manager was that it was obvious that all 5 packages were prepared by qualified architects. An interesting point that came out in this discussion was that the insurance requirement the builder had to meet was $10 million. I was glad to here the project manager state that the RFQ was posted on Dodge and in the Plan Room. I was disappointed that it appears that none of the council members confirmed before hand the RFQ would be widely posted by asking for a list. Nor did any of them ask for a copy of any of the ads. To me advertising the RFQ seemed like an important aspect of the bidding procedure. Back in June it appeared that a good advertisement was important to at least one of the council members also. As a side note when the city decided to advertise the RFQ for the early site work one of the places they did this was on the city's website on the Music Center page. It appears as if they did not use this resource for the building package.
Another interesting item - the bid package is 150 pages long. Expect the bids to arrive the first week of September.
Good Sports is in the architectural design phase. There is no formal city / Good Sports agreement in place. Good Sports has not yet submitted a zoning permit application. Their private funding efforts are schedule to close in the next couple of weeks. Besides our project they are looking to raise enough capital to build 6 other projects.
Award of the $12 million Building Package Sept 23, 2013
Council voted to authorize the $12 million contract for the Music Center Building Package on Monday. To date there has been no public discussion that shows council members have seen or understand the financial impact to the city. The Music Center Validation study available here at HuberResidents.org has not be published by the city and the content raises concerns about the operation and revenue expectation.
Tonight we are going to vote whether we want to spend the largest portion of the cost to build the Music Center. Although it looks like we are fully committed because we have already spent $2.3 million on the land purchase and $2.4 million on preparing the site, it may be possible to recover most of that money if it turns out the Music Center concept is not feasible. However, after we get started on the building it will be impossible to make up for mistakes in planning. So I'm asking council to reflect on the wisdom of going forward when council hasn't demonstrated in public the feasibility of the project.
Because the city has not provided any in-depth public discussion about the feasibility of the Music Center, I recently asked the city to provide the reports that council used to decide we will be able to pay off the debt associated with the Recreational Complex and the Music Center. I was provided two documents concerning the financing and the Validation Study. These documents although never made public as part of an official city meeting or discussion make me wonder if council members can make a responsible decision on whether we as a city should go forward with the Music Center.
Specific concerns about the information that council appears to be using to justify the project include: Incomplete analysis of the revenue we expect from new business in "The Heights", dated information about the financing of Aquatic Center, an unrealistic expectation of being able to hold 6 festivals a year, a business plan the calls for directly competing with the Dayton Philharmonic by bringing in the Cincinnati Symphony 4 times a year, a marketing plan that implies we can fill the music center with just $2000 of advertising per event, and an expense expectation based on the city hiring all the management personnel even though it recommends a more costly outside management arrangement. Most interesting is that even though council is open about our design being based on the design for the PNC pavilion and that they hired the same contractor that built theirs to build ours, they have done a poor job in explaining the differences in the two projects that justify why our project costs $18 million while the Validation Report tells us the PNC was built for $6.5
The document addressing the Aquatic Center had specific information about the specific pieces of property that would be generating the taxes to pay off the Aquatic Center debt. For instance it tells us to expect Wal-mart to pay $239,000 worth of tax until 2015 and then $101,000 in tax after that. The document for the music center does not show that type of detail and it doesn't give any indication how the tax numbers were created.
The other big problem with the report the city gave me about the Music Center financing was it was still using data from Sept 2011 when the Recreational Complex computations were done. In that report they expected to finance up $6.8 million in 2011 at 4.5% interest. We know that they now intend to complete that financing in November of 2013, instead of $6.8 million they have $12.5 million of Recreational Complex debt to finance and we don't know the interest rate but we do know they have been climbing since April. On the bright side because they haven't been paying the debt the TIF money "on hand" is significantly higher than the $2 million they expected to start with in 2011. This should offset some of the problems caused by higher interest rates and almost twice the expected principle. However, without an updated report with real numbers it is impossible for council to know if we are on schedule to pay of the Aquatic Center and so it is impossible to make a responsible decision about the new debt for the Music Center.
Specific concerns from the Music Center validation center include an expectation that the city will be able to hold 6 music festivals a year where we sell 30,000, $15,00 tickets. In the Validation Report it tells us planning for each successful event can take more than a year. I've not seen any public discussion that shows the planning for next year's event have begun.
Looking at the Validation Plan we see they plan to bring the Cincinnati Symphony here 4 times a year to compete against the Dayton Philharmonic. Last year the city brought the Dayton Philharmonic to Huber Heights and more than half the available 800 seats went empty.
The Validation Study show the 6 festivals and 4 Local Events are suppose to bring in almost half the total number of people using the Music Center.
The report tells us to succeed will take aggressive marketing and also shows us that they intend on doing this with less than $2000 of event marketing per Music Center event. In contrast when the city brought in the Dayton Philharmonic they authorized $6000 for marketing that event.
The report tells us to hire a management company. Then it computes the cost of the Managing Director, Production & Operations Manager and 4 other positions as if they were going to be city employees. Cost to hire these same people using a private contractor could easily add $150,000 to the cost of managing the facility.
The Validation Study tells us the PNC Pavilion cost $6.5 million. We know the PNC didn't have to purchase property and they shared the cost of parking, restrooms and concession stands with Riverbend. Our facility also will have a better cosmetic appeal and a sound barrier between it and the highway. However, council has not taken the time to show the public how these differences add up to $12 million in additional cost.
Tonight we are going to vote on whether we should spend the largest portion of the Music Center cost and the information provided to the residents of Huber Heights does not show the project is feasible. I ask each council member to reflect on the vote they are about to cast. If they are aware of information that mitigates these concerns I ask that they provide it in an open public meeting. It they are unaware I ask that they defer a yes vote until a proper assessment is completed.
Correction to $12.5 million figure cited in council presentation
Turns out the pre-meeting write-up I had posted on the web site gave better insight into the financing portion of the issue.
When I constructed the revision it was not my intention for the $12.5 million recreational complex number I cited to include money borrowed because of the Music Center. The city officially refers to the combination of the Aquatic Center and Eichelberger Amphitheater as the Recreational Complex. On April 22, 2013 the city passed "An Ordinance Providing For The Issuance And Sale Of Notes In The Maximum Principal Amount Of $4,500,000, In Anticipation Of The Issuance Of Bonds, For The Purpose Of Paying The Costs Of Improving The City's Municipal Recreation Facilities". They also passed "An Ordinance Providing For The Issuance And Sale Of Notes In The Maximum Principal Amount Of $8,020,000, In Anticipation Of The Issuance Of Bonds, For The Purpose Of Paying The Costs Of Improving The City's Municipal Recreation Facilities".
In the second piece of legislation it was obvious this was for the construction of the Aquatic Center because the agenda item description continues with "By Constructing, Equipping And Furnishing A Multi-Purpose Municipal Recreation Complex To Include Among Other Things An Aquatic Center, Athletic Playing Fields, Outdoor Amphitheater, Recreational Trails, Picnic Shelters, Playgrounds, Dog Park, And Related Facilities, Including The Acquisition Of Real Property And Interests Therein And Improving The Site Therefor, Together With All Driveways, Roads, Parking Facilities, And Other Necessary Appurtenances Thereto, And Declaring An Emergency".
In the first piece of legislation I mistook the "By Constructing, Equipping And Furnishing A Multi-Purpose Facility, Including Among Other Amenities, Concession Facilities, Restrooms, Parking Facilities, Landscaping And Related Driveways And Roads, And Acquiring Real Estate And Interests Therein, Together With All Necessary And Related Appurtenances Thereto, And Declaring An Emergency" as work that was done for the Amphitheater. Turns out the first legislation was written to cover expenses for the Music Center.
Therefore, refering to $12.5 million for Recreation was technically correct, it wasn't my intention to lump Music Center money in with Aquatic Center money. Turns out my pre-meeting posting on the subject better characterized the amount of principle being borrowed and the re-write was unitentially less accurate. I hate inaccuracies. Unfortunately the lack of timely information provided as part of regular city meetings means these kinds of things aren't talked out in a timely manner which promotes the spread of misinformation.
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News: Music Center Updated; Ongoing first post 9 Jan 2013
Award of the $12 million Building Package Sept 23, 2013
By Tom_McMasters posted October 1st 2013, 4:17 PM