Mayoral candidate Tim Holden is pulling no punches over the fine print in the Lowertown ballpark contract between the city of St. Paul and the Ryan Cos. The design-build contract requires Ryan to submit a design for the 7,000-seat ballpark in August 2013.
Well, August has come and gone, and Ryan has completed a schematic, but major design appears to be months away. A timeline on Lowertownballpark.com indicates that the design would be completed between October 2013 and April 2014, with construction beginning in April.
In an email to the Scoop below, St. Paul Parks and Recreation spokesman Brad Meyer says expect to see some “more detailed design drawings” in October.
Well, April 2014 sure isn’t August 2013. Meyer says the design process was slowed a bit as the city returned to the negotiating table with the St. Paul Saints this summer. The Scoop reminds readers that the ballpark’s price tag went up from $54 million to $63 million, forcing some fresh talks and an angsty new vote of the St. Paul City Council to accept the budget adjustment.
Here’s Holden’s email message to the Scoop:
I am not sure if you have heard that the new ballpark design/build contract with Ryan Construction has been delayed due to all of unknown cost overruns.
The original proposal/plan was due in August of this year, however, with all of the additional expenses Ryan has delayed submitting the design/build total costs of this project until after the upcoming Mayoral Election.
Now, not until next February 2014.
This project needs to be analyzed and reviewed just like the Vikings stadium.
A good pen with all facts put on the table will enlighten the state about subsidized spending and the priorities we have embarked on.
This project will be voted on when I am elected in November and the citizens will decide if and where the new Saints ballpark location shall be.
Tim Holden
Meyer of St. Paul Parks and Rec says not to worry, the Saints will still throw out the opening pitch in the Spring of 2015. On Lowertownballpark.com, the timeline indicates that the design will be complete by next April, and the foundation, service and concourse level will go up that month, followed by the seating bowl in May. The new plaza would go up in June and August 2014. By the end of next August, the ballpark would have its own scoreboard. The playing field would go in next September, around the time Midway Stadium on Energy Park Drive gets torn down. Final inspections of the new ballpark would take place in December 2014 — well before the first Saints game of the season on May 15, 2015.
Says Meyer:
“Schematic design is finished and we are now in design development. … Dates on a paper for milestones related to design elements really are just placeholders. The design and various elements can and will be tweaked throughout the project, which is a key benefit of a design-build project, so dates on paper just give a good indication on project timeline. The dates that matter are construction starting date and construction finishing date — neither of which have changed or were delayed since we awarded the contract to Ryan…
The budget adjustment and Saints negotiations earlier this summer did affect those placeholder design dates, but we have progressed from schematic design into design development and are on schedule and now on budget. Expecting that we will have more detailed design drawings in October to share as well (Feb. is a date for the guaranteed Max price to be locked-in, but since it is a design-build project, we literally know every day where the budget is at, and not much is expected to change from now until the completion of the project).”
So what do you think, dear Scoop reader? Is the lateness of the ballpark design a concern worth fretting about, a surmountable but significant bump in the road, or just a minor footnote that amounts to so much inside baseball? Feel free to sound off, below…