Construction of the West 12th Street police substation will move forward after the Little Rock Board of Directors voted Tuesday to approve an increase of more than $2 million in construction costs.
The board voted 8-2 to approve the construction contract revisions after spending almost an hour discussing how the cost increase came about and how it would be paid for. Other concerns raised during the conversation about the 44,000-squarefoot building included whether the contract was in the right form, whether planned retail space should remain in the mixed-use building plan and whether it would affect other projects scheduled for sales-tax funding.
“I’ve done the math, and with all the costs adding up to about $13 million, this ends up being a $300-a-square-foot building,” said Ward 3 Director Stacy Hurst. “That seems peculiar to me.”
Hurst and At-large Director Joan Adcock voted against the proposed contract change, in the end citing their concerns about the cost increase.
“When I campaigned for the sales tax, I looked at neighborhood people and said, ‘we’re going to do this within budget,’” Adcock said. “I cannot support this. I told people we would try our best to spend this money how we told them we would. And I don’t believe this would be.”
East-Harding Adevco LLC, the construction manager for the project, will receive a fee of about $453,000 from the $12.5 million approved Tuesday and is scheduled to break ground sometime in July.
The substation has been planned since 2006, but the size and scope have changed several times. The first plan called for using an existing building that housed a thrift store at the corner of West 12th and Pine streets, but that building was found to be structurally deficient.
The department next envisioned a much smaller facility, but Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas said when he and other department officials realized the growing issues at the police department headquarters on West Markham Street, the planned footprint expanded. The facility grew to the current plan to house the operations and equipment from the headquarters, which will be rebuilt with sales-tax money at a later date.
The original price tag quoted in the sales-tax increase pitch made to Little Rock residents was $10 million. The city used $2 million in short-term bond funding to buy the property, demolish the building and pay an architect for a design before the sales tax went into effect in January 2012.
City Manager Bruce Moore said the short-term bond funding had already been paid back and was not paid through sales tax money. He also said the increase in the price tag for construction would come out of money the city collected when it paid off a series of 2004 capital bonds ahead of schedule.
Moore also said that the costs were caused partly by those changes, but also by an inflation in construction costs because the estimates and plan were made during the economic recession.
Ward 2 Director Ken Richardson, who worked on the 12th Street Corridor revitalization plan, said he was not pleased with the price increase, but wanted the project to move forward.
“The community has been waiting for this project and we’ve been talking about it since … before I was on the board,” he said. “Some projects, processes, etc., get microscopic scrutiny while other projects get none.”
Part of the design, which was discussed during the corridor plan meetings with community members and residents, will include retail and commercial space.
Thomas said the building was designed as a kind of safe haven with an open courtyard and space for community services such as a library book drop or a post office drop with stamps.
Hurst said she was wary of including that commercial lease space.
“I do not agree philosophically that we should be in the business of speculative real estate,” she said.
Other directors and Mayor Mark Stodola said there are a lot of similarities between the substation plan and the original plans for the city’s River Market district. Stodola said the public commitment and investment were pivotal in drawing the private investment to the River Market area.
At-Large Director Gene Fortson said he was not happy with the $300-per-square-foot price tag, but said the overall plan for the building had grown to something beyond a simple substation.
“This thing grew … and became an anchor for the revitalization plan. Then it became a symbol,” he said. “If we had just built a commercial building, it would have been built quicker and cheaper. But this grew because of the process into an iconic project for that effort and for that community.”
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 06/19/2013