Cape Informer

A number of very good ideas were passed around both before and after the vote for reducing the short term costs of our public safety building. I would like to offer endorsement for several of these ideas:

Separating Police and Fire into two different buildings. The administrative staff of the Fire department can be housed efficiently as an add on to one of the fire stations in the Northern half of the City. This will significantly reduce the footprint of the initial building on the City Campus.

Which brings me to the land acquired by quick take. I believe that we have a moral obligation to return the land to the original owner. It would be incorrect for us to complete an imminent domain proceeding for land for the Public Safety Building, if we are not building the Public Safety building on that land.

If in the future we have a need for more land, then we should move forward with purchasing more land. To use imminent domain to forcibly take land that we are not using for a stated purpose would be very much against the spirit and the letter of imminent domain.

For the new Police facility, we should then build it on existing City land, here on the campus. The facility should be built for 10 years of growth and designed for expansion to 30 years of growth. It is a reasonable compromise which should also reduce the overall cost of the building today.

The new Police facility needs to contain a new Public Safety Answering Point for E911 services. The current space alloted to 911 currently should be reclaimed by the Emergency Operations Center. This should provide sufficient space for their needs.

For a parking garage, I generally agree with Mr. Berardi’s suggestion, but with a few caveats. There is a great deal of urban development research showing that downtown parking garages are not an effective use of space. It would be best to put the garage somewhere centrally located and offer efficient mass transit from the central location to the pedestrian shopping areas. Please review the available research carefully when considering placement of parking garages. It will likely be viable to have several conveniently located garages each near our different large, concentrated pedestrian areas. This would also serve our long term safety needs better because we can actually split some of our safety assets between two or more hurricane safe garages.

Lastly the old City Hall land should be used to provide offices to City Services in the Future. The old City Hall building will likely need to be demolished, or heavily renovated. The land that it sits on should be used for the growth and future of our City.

I hope you take the above items into consideration when making your decisions. I do believe that each of the above options represents a reasonable compromise between the needs of our Police and Fire and the desire of the Residents of Cape Coral to see a lower cost plan for our public safety needs.

I wasn’t personally able to attend the bid opening today at City Hall. However, I did make a quick call to Larry Laws of MWH to get his take of how the first opening went.

He shared with me that this was one of the two largest areas of construction for the SouthWest 5 UEP. Denco was the low bidder. If you’re not familiar with Denco, they’re one of the real success stories of our UEP.

A small vendor who mostly handled the “hard work” in Ft. Myers, they started out by doing deep work and congested city street work in Ft. Myers. They answered the advertisements in 2001 for new contractors for our UEP. Since then they have slowly but steadily grown in size and become a worthy competitor in the bidding for our utility projects.

Their winning bid of $10,236,352.00 is a good sign, nearly 3 million below the engineers estimate. The engineer appeared to be very conservative, coming in at $13,156,521.00. All of the bids were priced well, the market price showing approximately $11.5 million dollars. SW Utilities came in at 11.2 million, Forsberg at 11.4 million, Diamond at 11.6 million and Mitchell and Stark at 12.6 million. The remaining bids were 13.9M (Reynolds), 15.9M (Westral) and D.N. Higgins came in the highest at $16,752,762.

Only one resident was in attendance before the opening, Councilwoman Bertolini. Just before opening, Joe Lentini arrived and just after, Lynn Rosko. Several members of the press were also in attendance.

All in all, a solid first opening, with a good outlook for this project. We’ve got more bidders and a highly competitive bidding environment. I believe it bodes well for the SW5 assessment amount. After all of the openings occur, we will get a final price from the city on the assessments. I will be watching every week until the openings are completed.

On a closing note, I’ve recently published copies of the memos from Mark Mason about price comparisons between Bonita Springs Utility and Marco Islands Utility with the Cape Coral Utility. The construction costs at the Cape were significantly lower than either of the two other cities. Please take a look at the memos and judge for yourselves. I think that the facts are proving that we’ve made a decent choice in MWH and we are coming in at a lower price than neighboring communities. Can we now work together and find a different way to PAY the costs, much like our neighbors have?

Bonita Springs

Marco Island

Edit: Low Bidder. Denco still has to pass final qualification. Thanks for pointing that out Ralph.

Download PDF

Just received a few moments ago. Please download it and take a look.

I received this after the council meeting yesterday. Mr. Stewart requested a comparison document from Mark Mason, Here is the result:

Download PDF File.

I uploaded to a free file hosting, I had to scan and assemble my paper copy as PDF. Hopefully it will show up on the official city site soon.

Here are a few highlights:

Bonita’s actual install cost for their 04 and 05 Sewer only installs came in at $16,995.16 and $16,667.57, while Cape Coral came in nearly 10k less in each year, $6772.78 and $6964.68.

Impact/Hookup Fees saw Cape Coral slightly higher on some and lower, or non existent fees in other cases.

Mr. Mason goes into detail about the debt service methodology that BSU chose to utilize and he also compares the entirety of the septic replacement in Bonita by size with SE1. It is a worthwhile read and provides a written source for some of the information I have tried to share for many months now.

In response to City must face utility problems.

Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 13:28:51
From: “Lloyd Duhon” gmail com>
To: “Tom Hayden” news-press com>
Subject: Answer to Wednesday’s Editorial

In your editorial on Wednesday the 7th, you stated that the Cape needed to “Face Utility Problems”. I would present to you that this is exactly what the city has done.

The utility construction projects from the early 90s resulted in a gigantic mess. Fourteen square miles of the city was torn up at the same time. The City was in a legal mess. We paid millions of dollars to settle lawsuits. Residents were understandably upset by the conditions they were forced to live under.

The City faced that complex series of problems. They designed a new proposal to fix the many problems that were uncovered from the first project. They broke the areas into smaller groups. Areas that could be finished relatively quickly and with relatively fewer interruptions for the residents. They made requirements for customer support. They made requirements for engineering that would ensure the highest quality product. They made requirements for worker safety. They made requirements that ensured that subcontractors would be able to effectively perform the work that was required. In all of this they “Faced Utility Problems”.

They also found a different model for construction. The method known as Construction Manager at Risk. Our City leaders did not “make it up” or attempt some process that no one had heard of The rules were not invented as we went along. Instead, The City followed the lead of places like the American Institute of Architects who in their “CM@Risk Compendium” make many positive assertions about the process. These assertions include “Transparency is enhanced, because all costs and fees are in the open, which diminishes adversarial relationships between components working on the project, while at the same time eliminating bid shopping.” This certainly is the case in our utility projects. As a resident I requested access to all of this cost information and I was provided that access. It was a massive volume with every single cost for every single aspect of the project.

The AIA is not the only entity supporting CM@Risk. In fact, Florida has a wide number of projects undertaken by government entities which have utilized the process. Florida’s Department of Transportation provides information that the Florida Legislature approved trial
projects with CM@Risk as early as 1996. The FDOT has guidelines by which an entity should evaluate the use of CM@Risk.

• Building type projects where construction methods and specifications vary between professional groups (i.e., engineer/architect and constructions trades).
• Innovative funding scenarios, where multiple owners may dictate final project criteria.
• Projects where limiting budgets threaten the delivery of the project and where CM alternative can help maintain costs.
• Other projects, where construction input is required during early phases of design.

Each of the above criteria matches the situation in the City of Cape Coral. We require different professional groups to perform the construction and the planning. We have a wide variety of property owners responsible for funding their portion of the project. Our budget is definitely limited by the incomes of the people affected. It is also very much a requirement that early phases have great planning in place, otherwise we are faced with serious dilemmas, such as we
found in the early 90s.

In addition, many other Florida agencies have moved forward with CM@Risk projects. The City of Palm Coast used the method to construct their City Hall. Hernando County hired one Construction Manager for a number of new School buildings. Miami and Polk County both used the method to complete Fire and EMS buildings.

In the case of School construction, the Florida Statutes have already been updated to include the Construction Manager at Risk in statute “235.211 Educational facilities contracting and construction techniques. ” In this particular portion of State Statute it clearly states that you must select the CM@Risk using a competitive process, which our city did. After this you can retain this Construction Manager to complete projects with subcontractors as long as the
subcontractor process follows the same competitive bidding rules, which MWH has done faithfully since the inception of the UEP.

If we’re following the rules as laid out in other more recently updated State Statutes, why would we not seek to update the generic statute that is the defining statute by which all competitive
negotiation occurs? It would seem the prudent thing to do.

Despite reports to the contrary, Mickey Rosado was not at council meeting tonight, requesting a hearing for his alleged charter violations. The meeting consisted of a large amount of discussion on upcoming sewer and water expansions. The council voted to continue discussion until next week for the Southwest 6 & 7 areas, hoping for additional cost savings. The mayor did bring forward an initiative to change the date of council meetings. They also announced that Tuesday the 20th would be the next special meeting of council, to appoint a district 7 representative.

The discussion naturally moved to money very quickly. Probably the number one comparison that has been made was one of “$269 per square foot.” This of course, is the simple math of the total estimate of the project, divided by the 410,000 square feet in the planned building.

Chief Petrovich pulled out the cost breakdown pie chart, and showed a much more illustrative listing of figures.

As reported here previously, most of these numbers are estimates, some of them are already well on their way to being reduced. Especially the Land number. I asked for a better breakdown of the Design and Permitting item, because it was one that had generated some confusion and questions on the forums. They were not individually aware of the breakdown, but they put me in touch with the City Engineer responsible for the cost breakdowns, and he was able to provide me with this further breakdown:

Overall the building cost itself comes in at approximately $74 per square foot, which is within $10 per square foot of many similar PSB projects that have recently completed, in our region of the country.

We discussed the computer and office equipment line item as well. They made it clear that any computer equipment, and office equipment that was usable within the existing space would be brought over to the new building. Much of the equipment line item includes the new equipment for the EOC. This includes a complete duplicate of the existing EOC equipment. They will simultaneously have both facilities online, and then remove the equipment from the old, and move it to the new. This will double the ability of the EOC to respond to simultaneous dispatches. Currently, we can only dispatch a single incident at a time.

There are also a number of modernizations occurring in the evidence processing areas. This department is currently hardest hit in the space squeeze. Rules of Evidence, known as the “Chain of Custody” requires very specific handling of evidence. Failure to do so results in lost cases, and potentially, jail time for evidence technicians.

They are also required to hold certain paper files, especially fingerprints, “essentially forever” which explains the large bulky file cabinets that line the hallways. The new facility is designed from the ground up to include appropriate archival space for this requirement. This of course, was never designed into the former City Hall Building, which is the current home of our Police and Fire departments.

I requested information about the “Site Prep” line item. Chief Van Helden explained that the monies went to clearing, excavation, utility installation, and then building up the land to a compromised 14 foot elevation. They originally planned 16 feet, but found a reasonable mix of cost savings and continued safety by moving it down to 14 fet.

Put another way, and in his own words “We don’t want this building to blow away, or float away.” Speaking to the threats of both high winds, and storm surge. By putting the building at that elevation, they create a safe place for our emergency response workers to wait out the storm. If a storm greater than category 1 hits Cape Coral, they have to evacuate the current building, which most likely puts our emergency response assets outside of Cape Coral in the immediate aftermath of a storm.

In a continuing effort to get to the facts about the new Public Safety Building Proposal, I called Chief Petrovich’s office, and requested a meeting. His assistant Chris was extremely helpful and friendly, and she was able to juggle schedules and get a few minutes from both Chief Petrovich and Chief Van Helden. They were accompanied by Dyan Lee, the Police Department’s PIO. They met with me in Chief Petrovich’s office.

The first thing you have to note about both of these gentlemen, was their obvious passion for the job that they do. They were consummate professionals, eager to share their knowledge, and their love for our City. They were also quick to point out the pitfalls of the current building, and the real dilemma we will face in the event of a major storm passing through our area.

Both of them readily admitted that mistakes were made in the early stages of the project, primarily centered around communication about the project itself. They are working actively to correct that situation, and they were happy to provide me with information that helps express the problems that they are facing.

A great deal of speculation has been made on the blogs and forums. Many people expressed concerns about the cost, the state of disrepair of the current building and the oft mentioned ‘done deal’ atmosphere. I questioned the Chiefs about the assertions made out on the Internet, and got a lot of solid information that shatters the myths.

I asked if the Police and Fire departments planned to share the new space with other city government agencies.

Chief Petrovich offered a few cautions, explaining that certain portions of the facility could not be open to non-police personnel. These areas include places like the holding cell areas, and evidence processing areas. These areas will be built for growth for the next 15 years, and will represent unused space, early in the project. However, he added that he hoped to “shop around” for other police agencies, such as county, state, or federal law enforcement groups that may need some of the specialized space that they offered. There was some discussion that we could potentially lease some of the unused space to these agencies, and help defray some of the cost of the building. Chief Petrovich was also quick to point out that they were still evaluating other areas of the facility that could appropriately house non law enforcement personnel. He intends to follow through on the Mayor’s demand that the space be used as efficiently as possible.

Some of the space that is built for growth for the Fire department will go into immediate use for some of the city employees at the overcrowded City Hall. The Fire Department has much lower restrictions on cohabitation in the space that is assigned to them. The City Auditor’s Office, which is currently in the same building as Police and Fire, may also move over to the new space when it is constructed.

Both of the Chiefs also agreed that there is another often over looked advantage in the new space. Currently, there is no space in the existing facility to grow “departmentally”. In other words, if the Police need to add a CSI Unit, or a Gang Unit, or a Family Services Unit or some other new department to offer new services to our City, they simply cannot do it with the current space.

Some space changes are already in the works. The IT Department gets a significant boost, as does City Hall, when the IT department removes computer equipment from the Network Operations Center in City Hall to the EOC building. This will put the City’s entire IT infrastructure in a hardened, secure facility, that is already purpose built for extensive computer operations. The new Public Safety Building will include a fully modernized EOC, to replace the existing one. The space limitations in the existing facility allowed for only nine seats. They currently have 11 operators in the various roles, and they are unable to add additional radios to expand their ability to respond to more than one dispatch at a time, per service.

In addition, the current police and fire building sits on City land. The City has a number of options, including building new office space on this land, to house other offices for our growing city. As the mayor also pointed out, this new (or renovated) facility could also house many of the County and State services that Cape Coralians currently have to travel to Ft. Myers for.

It is that time of year again. Students busily preparing for the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, otherwise known as the “FCAT”. The FCAT, like many other things, started with excellent intentions. By testing students knowledge of the subjects necessary for success, the State could more easily gauge the general direction of our public education system.

Unfortunately, this system has led to unforeseen consequences that are damaging the future of our children, and severely hampering their real education. In order to get funding for their schools, teachers have to concentrate on getting the children ready for the test. This in practice is leading to larger amounts of time preparing for the test, and little or no time on the subjects that students may need help on. The end result is a student who has passed the State Tests but has missed out on a fundamental skill, because the teacher was unable to spend the time necessary to properly teach the skill.

My wife and I are active, concerned parents. We check our kids homework, we guide them in their decisions, and we keep tabs on them through the email system with the school. We hear from the teachers on a regular basis, and we keep in touch, and volunteer heavily in school. The last report card came home with low grades. Today’s interim report comes home with low grades. We question the teachers about the lower grades, looking for suggestions in helping shore up the knowledge base that the child needs to perform. The answer we get is that the grade will come up by the end of the quarter, because they have spent time preparing for the FCAT.

This FCAT stuff is serious business. They have sent home workbooks for the children, and for the parents. In this picture, the 138 page “Blast Off on Florida Reading” is a workbook for our children to use at home to help prepare for the FCAT. The “Keys to the FCAT” is a parental primer, 37 pages of hints, tips, and sample questions for passing the FCAT. Why are we specializing our children in the subjects of a standardized test? Why would we not send home a “Keys to the 4th Grade” book that would explain the topics that students will learn in the 4th Grade?

My children have scored “very high” on the FCAT last year. They came from a different school system, and were very well prepared. They are in all advanced classes. They do all of their homework, even when we spend upwards of 5 hours in the evening finishing it all. We quiz before school when we’re aware of tests coming up that day.

My middle son has a low grade on his interim report in writing. We emailed the teacher, and yet again, the FCAT has reared its ugly head. He is having some difficulty with expository writing, and they have had only a few tests during this quarter, because of FCAT preparation. He’s got an issue that he needs assistance with, but they’re unable to see about it until after the testing is completed.

This teacher is an excellent teacher. She is extremely involved. She works hard with these students. She teaches an after school creative writing course, which my son attends. She is concerned for him, and for her other students, and it shows in everything she does. She is doing what she has to do to ensure that she is ‘judged appropriately’ by the powers that be. How does this help our children, or our teachers?

I have met with the teachers, and the principal in our school many times. They are educators, and they’re determined to teach their kids. The parents at the school that I speak to are determined to teach their kids. We should not be suffering through this unintended consequence. It is time for a change in the manner that we go about examining our children’s progress.

When all is said and done, the child’s grades, his extra curricular activities, and his SAT/ACT scores will determine his collegiate placements. I doubt highly that the FCAT test will have much weight, if any on the college’s decisions. It’s time we come back to concentrating on the result, and not the gauge of the result.

The mayor announced a Town Meeting for last night, from 6 until 8 PM. I decided to drop in and try to pin down the topics that were of interest to Cape Coralians today. What I found was a surprisingly positive group, with only a couple of the ‘usual suspects’ who haunt the regular weekly City Council meetings. The tone of the entire event was one of jovial, upbeat questions and answers.

The meeting was attended by approximately 100 residents, two television crews, someone from the news-press, and myself. The City was represented by the Mayor, Terry Stewart, Chief Petrovich, and later, Carl Schwing, who came in late, due to a prior family commitment.

There were some real concerns for the residents who attended. I would say that the largest single portion of the city that was represented was that of the North West Cape. There were a number of individuals who spoke of that area, and their issues were primarily focused around issues on and around Burnt Store Road.

These residents questioned the new combined Fire/EMS station. This station will be a county facility, so there weren’t many answers to be found here, other than reassurances that the city is working to make sure that the two different systems can offer in kind support for one another.

They also expressed grave concerns over the north spreader, and the mangroves nearby. One resident’s impassioned plea went on for several minutes, while she lamented the dying trees. Her concerns were not lost on the City’s representatives. Terry Stewart spoke at length about the difficulties that have accompanied the process of permitting the City to take action on this berm that is the responsibility of State agencies.

There was a little talk of the UEPs, but from a surprising source. A couple of residents near the Ceitus Parkway Neighborhood Park 4 area are concerned that they will have an assessment soon, because of the sewer and water extension coming from Burnt Store Road to the park will put them in a CIAC area. The City Manager said that he was looking for ways to defer the payments for these residents until the actual UEP comes to their area, but he also pointed out the fact that the CIAC should be less expensive than the actual Assessment that would come in the future.

Lastly, and likely the largest issue affecting the north west area, was construction sites. Apparently a large number of home sites are partially completed. Some for over two years. This may be representative of builders who have gone out of business, and in many cases, the land is no longer owned by the permit holders. Therefore, there is a great deal of research required to find the actual owner, so they can be noticed. This arduous process is ongoing for many sites in the north west, and residents were invited to call the City Manager’s office with specific addresses, for updates.

The south of the Cape was also well represented. Residents were concerned about crime. Chief Petrovich said, in a very reassuring manner, “It’s not a bad community, and we’re gonna keep it that way.” He was passionate about it, as was the Mayor. They reminded residents that the reporting in the news represented the Police doing their jobs correctly. By finding and busting the “Grow Houses” and successfully arresting the gang members of “Cash Feenz” they were taking the steps necessary to ensure ongoing safety. The Chief was also happy to report that he has seen no evidence of activity from the large, dangerous “national” gangs.

Another resident recommended setting up a “Community Resource Coalition” to help young people get more involved in the Arts, and other community activities. Chief Petrovich explained that we already have a wonderful organization in place for this, the CCYCIP. He was positively beaming when he spoke of the organization, and its many volunteers.

Definitely the largest group from the South Cape was the owners around the embattled golf course. Residents are seeking answers for the situation that they are in, and the Mayor provided some reassurance. He said he hopes that we can “Keep it a golf course” but he reminded residents that the zoning was R1 at this time. He has said that he hopes to work with Residents to find a compromise of a resort style hotel of “approximately 12 stories” to make the economic case for a business to come in and purchase the land. He assured the residents that he intended to make sure that the zoning matched the land use in any final project that made use of the golf course.

Someone brought up a question about Sunset towers. The Mayor hoped that the solution there would be a combination of “Willing Sellers and Willing Buyers.” He was adamant about his belief that eminent domain would not be used to take away homes from these residents forcibly.

The Mayor repeated his sentiment that he had shared with me earlier in the day about Councilman Rosado’s appointed replacement. Someone was wondering when the council would return to “full strength”. The Mayor said that the “Decaf Council” will only last for a couple of weeks, and he hoped to have the appointment a week from Monday, but two weeks at most. He reiterated the fact that all residents are represented equally by all council members, because they are elected at large.

There was some discussion about the new Public Safety building. Chief Petrovich assured residents that the disrepair of the facility is from a combination of the age of the poorly constructed building, coupled with the damage it received from Hurricane Charlie. He dismissed the claims that the building was allowed to fall into disrepair. He insisted instead, that they have put repair after repair into the building, and we’re finally reaching a point of diminishing returns.

Another resident was frustrated by the inability to reach someone during the call in show. Apparently a technical glitch kept people on a ringing line, with no way to get in to the show. The problem has been remedied, and they don’t expect it to occur during the next two scheduled shows.

Terry Stewart had a rather colorful comment at one point in the evening, when discussing the difficulties in dealing with the many varied problems of a growing city. “If you’re up to your butt in alligators, it’s hard to remember your job is to drain the swamp.” This elicited quite a bit of laughter, and more than one person said “I have to write that one down.” Indeed, I wrote it down as well.

People were upbeat throughout the conversation, with few exceptions. One resident went as far as calling the Mayor and City Manager “Rock Stars” for their recent help in resolving a complaint she had. Overall, the residents left satisfied, even the gentleman who was upset about the call in program. I spoke to him after the meeting, and he said he was satisfied with the answers he had received during the evening.

It was nice sitting in a room of residents focused on the betterment of their city. It reinforced my belief that Cape Coral was a great choice for my family.