Chatham-Kent Council members have chosen experience over cost when it comes to the first step of building Chatham's new arena.
During Monday night's council meeting, council narrowly voted in favour of changing the Price Score from 30 per cent to 10 per cent for the request for proposal of the architectural services for the proposed multi-use recreation facility.
Last month, council approved a motion to replace Chatham Memorial Arena and Erickson Arena with an indoor multisport community centre with up to 4,000 seats in addition to a 200-seat twin pad complex. The motion approved that night also included direction to municipal administration to proceed immediately with preliminary architectural work and land acquisition costs.
The "phase one" architectural work comes with a price tag of around $1 million. In order to find the best company for the job, the municipality must submit a request for proposals. All companies that submit a proposal are scored by the municipality to find out which one is the best fit for the job. A number of details about each company's proposal are compiled to generate a final score, such as how much experience the company has and the types of projects they've worked on in the past. The company with the best score overall is then awarded the contract.
Normally, in hopes of finding the lowest bidder, a municipal bylaw states that the cost of the proposal must account at least 30 per cent of the company's final score. However, after council's decision on Monday night, the cost of the architectural work for the arena complex will now only be weighted at 10 per cent and factors like past designs and past work will get a higher weight.
Some councillors questioned whether the process had ever been changed before. According to Thomas Kelly, general manager of infrastructure and engineering services, he found no record of the price score having ever been reduced.
Right off the bat, some councillors took issue with the change.
"Basically this is changing our process and our procedures to do this," said Steve Pinsonneault. "Cost is a big factor in everything we do and sometimes it gets into millions of dollars...honestly I think cost does play a big part and I can't support that we're going to lower the cost factor of the scoring process."
While conducting a request for proposals is common practice for the municipality, Kelly, explained they are often dealing with the same companies and with similar jobs such as bridges and roads. He said the municipality is going into new territory when it comes to building a recreation centre and wants to make sure the job is done correctly. One of the conditions of the building the arena is that project will only move forward if a minimum of $46.6 million of government grants is secured. According to Kelly, there is a lot at stake and he was afraid the 30 per cent weight for the cost would unfavourably skew who gets the contract, something he's said he's seen happen in the past.
"This is a one-time opportunity here," said Kelly. "We don't have any database on multi-use facilities so we really wanted to choose the supplier who had significant experience...say the lowest quotation comes in at $20,000 and someone quotes $40,000. That $40,000 proposal could be the very best, most experienced person who's done government applications as well in the past and The one who quotes $20,000 has none of that."
The architectural firm that does get the job will be designing a conceptual site design with no fine details of the facility. Kelly said it's important to start the architectural process in order to proceed with government funding applications. Kelly said although the cost may be higher for the job, it doesn't compare to the importance of getting the government grants.
"Typically at the end of the day, the lowest cost usually gets the work," said Kelly. "In this case, I think it's in our best interest to choose the experience first because of the benefits we'll get."
Councillor Michael Bondy expressed worry that the project was moving too quickly and that council was "putting the cart before the horse" by paying for the architectural work done without any certainty of securing government funding or without any final decision on how many seats the facility will have.
"You're in for a dime you're in for a dollar kind of thing," said Bondy. "My question is if we don't know what we're building, how do we hire an architectural firm to design something that we don't know what we're building?"
However, according to Kelly, he was given enough outline on the framework to proceed with the architectural process. He once again stressed the importance of having the architectural design completed in order to get a better chance of receiving funding.
"On the design standpoint, you told me you wanted a twin pad, you wanted an indoor multisport and you wanted associated fields equal to 60 acres. So that's what we'll design to, in that envelope and that's the key. If things change and we go from 4,000 [seats] to 2,200, it's not going to change the overall design substantially at this phase one time period."
A request for proposals has not gone out yet for the job, when it does the municipality will still ensure that the cost for the work is capped off at a certain point within their specific budget.
After nearly half an hour of discussion, the motion to reduce the price score passed 10-8.