Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration received City Council’s go-ahead Monday night to nearly double its contract with a key lakefront development consultant.
City Hall is paying $900,000 to landscape architecture firm Field Operations and subcontractors to draw up a lakefront master plan. Last week, city officials acknowledged that the firm had already billed $260,000 in excess of its $500,000 contract. Another $140,000 will fund additional work.
The measure passed with 13 votes in favor and two against.
At a committee hearing Monday afternoon, Finance Director Ahmed Abonamah said the cost overrun was not a case of the consultant making a low bid to win the contract before increasing its costs. Instead, Field Operations took on a bigger role advising on the city’s proposed land bridge to the lakefront.
It made sense to include landscape architecture designers in the bridge planning work, Abonamah said. That way, the end design would look like the “iconic connecting point between downtown and the lakefront that I think we all want it to be,” he said.
City officials realized in November that Field Operations was nearing the upper bound of its $500,000 contract, the finance director said. Rather than lose time by asking the consultants to stop their work, the city said they could continue while the administration worked out an extension with council.
“Certainly this is not best practice, and we recognize that we have put council in a difficult position,” Aboanamah said. He added, “This was all in good faith in an effort that we could get the project done in a timely manner.”
Legislation to extend the contract was introduced in November, Abonamah said. It was unclear why the extension didn’t receive a hearing until April. Council and the administration were busy the first months of the year on other big items, such as the housing code overhaul, the General Fund budget and the downtown TIF district.
But if the lakefront contract was urgent, Ward 10’s Anthony Hairston said, the administration should have said so. Council President Blaine Griffin, who voiced his concern about the contract on talk radio last week, seconded him.
“Councilman Hairston is right,” Griffin added. “Due to no action or inaction of council was this piece held up.”
Questions about timing aside, a bigger unknown looming over Cleveland’s lakefront plans is this: Will City Hall have to fill in a stadium-sized hole on the Lake Erie shore? The Browns have been eyeing land in Brook Park, just over the Cleveland municipal line, for a potential new stadium.
Abonamah told council last week that Field Operations would plan for alternate scenarios in the event that the Browns vacate the city’s lakefront stadium.
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