UPDATE: New information came to my attention after the publication of this piece that correct some critical assumptions I make below. Head over to this piece to see the update. I’ll leave the original post below as-is.

As mentioned in the preview, the City Council will consider City Hall’s final proposal for the Tewinkle Park lakes project this coming Tuesday. Given that the Agenda Report is grossly light on detail, I thought unpacking the background and issues relating to this project deserved its own post.

Back in 2021, city staff identified many issues arising TeWinkle Park’s lake and pond system, and recommended undertaking a comprehensive planning process to address them. There were three main problems: the lakes’ liners were leaking, the pond and streams features lacked waterproofing and therefore were leaking, and the entire system’s pump and filtration systems were not functional. Obviously, this had led to massive water quality problems, algae blooms, and, most significant to the city’s bottom line, a crazy amount of water loss. The consultant hired by the city estimated that the lakes were leaking approximately 8 million gallons of water annually. That’s equivalent to an Olympic-sized swimming pool’s worth of water every month.

Fast forward five years and presumably 40 million gallons of wasted water later — the City Clerk confirmed to me that zero repair work has been done at the TeWinkle lakes since January 1, 2021 — and the resulting work has been bid out not just once, but twice. Each time the bid has failed because the city received only one bidder for the work, and each time that insisted that the project would cost almost twice as much as the city’s estimate.

So, instead of beating a dead horse, City Hall is drastically downsizing the project to cover only repairing the lake liners. Seems reasonable right? Spend what’s in budget to stop the immediate bleeding?

You can’t hear it but I’m taking some very, very deep breaths.

First, this chopped down project isn’t even in-budget. It was budgeted to cost $2 million, but the award amount here is just over $2.7 million — a whopping 35% increase. To cover the shortfall, the City is proposing to cobble together funding from left over state grant funds (can we do that?) and the poor, overworked CAN fund (there’s that problem again). And if the project goes over? 🤷🏻‍♀️

Second, this has to be one of the most negligently prepared agenda reports I have seen in a long, long time. Completely absent from the report is the teensy, tiny detail that City Hall knows why the RFP failed to attract any competition that would bid down the price to a reasonable level: the project falls under the Community Workforce Agreement (CWA), and the CWA limits eligible bidders to compliant firms. And don’t take my word for it: I link to and quote directly from the agenda report regarding the first failed bid of the TeWinkle Lakes project here, which specifically fingers the CWA as the culprit and promised that City Hall would work to remove this project from the CWA and replace it with other, more compatible projects.

In March of this year, I submitted a public records request to confirm whether the City actually tried to amend the CWA. My request was denied.

So I will just assume the City chickened out of trying to renegotiate the CWA. Maybe they had good reason, but what they did try to do should have been disclosed and discussed. The Staff’s representations about future action should mean something.

Additionally, sidestepping the CWA entirely means that the Agenda Report doesn’t discuss the administrative costs to the city associated with CWA projects. Maybe they’re hoping the City Council doesn’t remember. But I do: for a $3 million project, the consultant we hired for this work, the Solis Group, estimated that the report alone will cost the city $40,000. And that’s just for compliance paperwork!

So, because of the CWA, we’re now left with half of a project at full cost plus. What did they have to cut to get the budget to “work”? Go watch the original presentation for this project. Every item of beautification for the human areas within the scope of work has been cut. Want a better deck for the lakes? Gone. Did you get excited about the improvements to the TeWinkle lakes islands, which were designed with gabion walls to limit waterfowl and were supposed to have a sewer drain to manage droppings? Too bad: those are gone.

What about improvements to the upper pond and stream, which has just as poor water quality as the lakes and are *also leaking*? Out.

And it gets worse. The City cut out the preparation work that would need to be done to even get the project started: the contractor’s inflated price doesn’t include work to drain the lake or to remove the wildlife. Will this happen by magic? Why is there no disclosure of the fact that this process itself will cost quite a bit of money? And if we’re already pinching pennies to cover the cost of this project, how will we fund this necessary prep work?

Finally, the city also cut out the “required” repairing and/or replacing the pump station, which our consultant told us wasn’t working and was grossly out-of-date two years ago.

And here’s the kicker: given that the pump station repair, the upper pond project, the island upgrades and repairs, and the draining/wildlife relocation were all within the original scope of the “TeWinkle Lakes” project under the CWA, are those projects still considered in-scope? Section 2.3 of the CWA suggests it would be: “Project Work will not be intentionally split, divided, or otherwise separated for contract award purposes to avoid application of this Agreement.”

So when the other pieces are eventually bid out, the CWA will continue the haunt the City’s steps. Every piece will need to adhere to the CWA, which means we may well be returning back to the same, overpriced bidder.

The Agenda Report should have rubbed the City Council’s nose in all of this. Instead, it doesn’t provide a lick of detail about what this project promised to deliver for the original $2 million budget and what a paltry result City Hall has secured for $2.7 million.

This is a complete failure. I don’t care how well the CWA might work for the typical road project. It’s absolutely eviscerated the most important restoration project in the city’s largest active-use park and wasted hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of taxpayer dollars in terms of water waste and staff time. And for what? Everything bagel liberalism?

The CWA should be thrown out when it is up for renewal next year.