Professionalism FAIL

It’s not that I disagree with the outcome. What was embarrassing to watch on Channel 14 was how the DeKalb city council disagreed.

The city council rejected the proposed agreement with PSA Dewberry to be the architect for the new police station. The consensus among those who voted against the agreement was opposition to the fees rate.

Another concern expressed was that Dave Jacobson (1st ward), Kristen Lash (3rd), Brendon Gallagher (4th) and Monica O’Leary (7th) were not on the city council when PSA Dewberry was chosen as the architect. Dave Baker (6th) was but he didn’t know the council had committed to PSA Dewberry. Those were the five aldermen who voted against the proposal. Tom Teresinski (2nd) and Ron Naylor (5th) voted in favor of authorizing the mayor to enter into the agreement with PSA Dewberry.

A flustered police chief, Bill Feithen, reminded the council that the police station project has been in front of their body of government for twelve years. This was the third time in Dave Baker’s (and Kris Povlsen) tenure on the council that a final architect had been chosen. Mayor Povlsen admonished the dissenting majority for their actions that would further delay a project needed since 2000. Kristen Lash shot back that this new council had already done more to advance the building of a new police station in its first seven months than previous councils had for more than a decade.

The council had previously rejected PSA Dewberry’s contract when it was first presented with a $1.14 million price tag that included various studies and civil engineering related tasks. Those add on items and some site features were taken away from the contract but the council still balked at the renegotiated $807,000 proposal. The add on items will still need to be purchased as part of the overall project costs.

During budget discussions the idea of setting a police station ceiling price of $12 million was deliberated and later formally approved by the city council. A gas tax increase was passed to be used as revenue to abate debt obligations necessary to fund the project. Staff assumed the site location and the architect had been determined. Obviously, they assumed too much.

Monica O’Leary had been talking with architects at various meetings and conferences she’s been attending. She said she gave their brochures and cards to Chief Feithen. Naylor said that Mr. Mason had given the council members information about alternative architects and/or construction methods. Baker referred to options he had passed out to council members and staff before the meeting started.

The Baker and Mason numbers evidently blindsided the staff. City manager, Mark Biernacki, was not in attendance of the meeting. The City’s legal counsel, Dean Frieders, was put in an awkward place of debating staff and council positions not restricted to law. The attorney should not have been put in that position.

Mayor Povlsen tried to circumvent what Naylor described as a fiasco. When the agenda item was first read he asked the council to consider a motion to postpone the matter indefinitely. He said later that he knew there was five votes against the PSA Dewberry proposal and feared rejection would put the police station project back to square one. He assumed, incorrectly, that the council would postpone the proposal and he advised staff to tell PSA Dewberry not to attend the meeting.

It would have been courteous and more professional for the council to have postponed the agenda item to the next meeting when Biernacki and PSA Dewberry would be present and staff had time to analyze the blindsided information to prepare response and options. The public through the media would be better served if such information was made available as part of the back-up material in the agenda. Instead the item was hotly debated without the city manager or the architect in question present to examine and respond to new information freshly presented.

In one heated exchange Chief Feithen asked Alderman Gallagher if the aldermen could meet “two-by-two” to discuss the agenda item privately why none of them had met with staff or the architect for dialog on the issue. At another point Dave Baker angrily denounced the staff demanding to know “who was running the show.”

The saga did not end with a simple vote to reject the PSA Dewberry contract. Staff was then advised to contact the three or four non-successful architect firms, and maybe some others if Feithen can find the brochures O’Leary gave him, and show them PSA Dewberry’s proposal to see if they could come up with better numbers. Of course, as a courtesy, PSA Dewberry would be granted the highly advantageous last spot in the order of hurried presentations.

For those who were paying attention during the SWOT (strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats) analysis session of the EPI studies, the chair of the finance advisory committee told the group that outsiders view the City of DeKalb as “backwards and incompetent.”

Here’s an example.