FedUp and Reality Checker have brought up good points questioning how our ball park costs can be so far different from the $50 million that we were promised they would not exceed.
After all we have:
- the city manager
- a deputy city manager with experience from the Arlington stadium project
- a chief financial officer of the city
- the city engineer
all working diligently on this project for us.
In addition, we have some real professionals including:
- International Facilities Group — hired to be the owner’s representative — being paid up to $853,000 dollars. Quoting directly from their contract with the city:
- The Consultant acknowledges that the construction budget for the Project allocates THIRTY FIVE MILLION AND NO/100 DOLLARS ($35,000,000) for the award of a construction contract base bid, which is to include all features essential to the operation of the Project for its intended use …”
- Turner Construction who has done 25 ball parks according to this estimate available on the city web site. 4×3 Turner Construction v2 – 6_25_2012 (1). Their estimate was $38,923.00. They did not get hired to do the job but after having done 25 ball parks I would think that their estimate deserves respect.
- Populous, the construction architect. They are being paid $3,820,680.00 to design the ball park with the same $35 million construction budget written into their contract.
- A construction company that has a contract with the city to build the ballpark with a construction budget of – $40,182,111.
- One of the owners of the sports group is ranked number 65 (according to their web site) of the top 300 building contractors. Certainly they are experienced with cost controls and budgets.
I would not be surprised if some of these firms do not come to the city expecting increases in their fees, after all they were hired to build a much cheaper facility.
A contract is a contract
The public has been made aware of the various costs through city council entering into contracts. Who has been driving the costs up? By what authority have they been doing it?
We had an estimate from an experienced ball park builder totaling $38.9 million. The city wrote contracts capping construction at $35 million.
Now we are at some number above $64 million.
The professional firms may have some liability here. Their reputations might suffer also. I doubt that they would make changes without direction from their masters at the city.
That leaves us with
The city employees are the ones that are most directly accountable to us. City council should investigate to find out which of our people is responsible for this and then take the appropriate actions.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
All those so called professionals, experts, and people with experience doing exactly the job they are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for … and they can’t get us a reliable, excuse the pun, “ballpark” figure??? And we still don’t have a final figure yet, and Mountainstar has already set at least another $10 million FUDGE FACTOR??? There is no accountablity from these people … in fact, it doesn’t appear that that they can even count anything other than their profits! This post is right on! Thank you! We do deserve better!
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City Council cannot and will not investigate city employees, because several council members and our last mayor were complicit. That’s why you’ll also never see all the e-mails or know the details of the private conversations between Mountainstar and certain council members. Remember Courtney Niland’s private meeting with Mountainstar that she wrote about to Joyce Wilson, saying that she was not going to share the info from that meeting with other council members? The fact that Alan Shubert was never even brought into the discussions until the implementation stage also shows how even some key senior staff were intentionally kept out of the process so as to not impede the cartel’s plan. Why would they not involve our most experience construction and engineering person in those early discussions? Easy answer.
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Maybe all the references to capping costs at $35 million meant that everyone involved would get a baseball cap as soon as they could hit $35 million in costs. That could explain why they quickly blew past that number. Maybe we were already past $35 mil the minute city council first voted; because all the city council members immediately put on their caps. Where are our caps?!
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Chilax..The Ball Park is “Law of the Land”…ah… where have I heard that before?
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Remember how you were told that the Pacific Coast League prefers — insists — on downtown ballparks? Well, that, too, was a ruse as some of us knew all along. The Las Vegas 51s are planning to move from their downtown stadium to a new stadium in the suburbs.The Howard Hughes Corp. hopes to use it as a magnet to attract other development in that area — uh, sort of like what happened around Cohen, but on a much grander scale. They want “help” from local government, but the team owners would donate the land. Of course the Round Rock Express also plays in a suburban setting. Isn’t that interesting?!
http://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/baseball/51s/future-owner-las-vegas-51s-pursues-new-ballpark-summerlin
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We have to remember this when Niland and Noe run for reelection and not give them a 2nd chance to steal our right to vote and sell it to Woody & Co. I am so glad that Limon trashed Goodman and sent a message to the Cartel that we want people who respect transparency and our right to vote, Goodman NOT being one of them.
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proper action should be taken regarding this topic
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