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HomeMy WebLinkAbout03/13/2001, 3 - DOWNTOWN TRANSFER CENTER: OSOS STREET IMPROVEMENTS, SPECIFICATION NO. 99267 Council Agenda Report—Downtown Transit Center—Plans and Specifications Page 2 extremely off schedule. As the NARF report neared its completion, staff pushed the DTC project so that the City Council could consider the two projects as possibly part of one larger comprehensive transit strategy for the downtown. What all is included in this Project? As shown on Attachment No. 1, the project consists of basically four elements: 1) Intersection improvements at the intersection of Osos and Palm. These enhancements are meant to bring a sense of place to the intersection and tie the three government centers (City Hall, County, and Library) together. This unique identity will give transit passengers a feeling of true sense of a transit center —although by no means the same sense that an off-street facility would. 2) Roadway and sidewalk improvements on Osos Street between Mill and Palm. In this area the sidewalk would receive a new treatment, including a sawtooth design to allow easier bus movements, pedestrian and bus passenger benches, landscaping, and new lighting. 3) Public restrooms. Located near Mill Street would be new restrooms to serve transit passengers and the general public. Currently transit passengers use restrooms at City Hall but often City Hall is closed. In addition, the Downtown Association has asked for more public restrooms at various locations throughout the area. Other areas anticipating more public restrooms are Parking Lot#2 (on Broad Street) and Marsh Street Parking Garage Expansion (restrooms located on Morro Street). 4) City Hall Parking Lot Improvements. About four years ago the City Council directed that the existing parking lot behind City Hall should be rebuilt. The Council agreed in 1998 to combine the City Hall Parking Lot project with the DTC because of the change in driveway locations (to Mill Street from Osos Street) and the fact that the DTC would actually encroach into a portion of the parking lot. When completed the City Hall parking lot will include new landscaping and 46 parking spaces, down from 50 current spaces. .When Council conceptually approved this plan, the loss of 4 spaces was considered an acceptable trade-off in exchange for an improved, safer DTC -City Hall parking lot relationship. Overall City Hall parking needs will be more fully addressed in the context of the Copeland/French building and our overall downtown parking strategy. These improvements include the removal, replacement and trimming of some trees within the parking lot and also along Osos Street. The tree removals within the parking lot have been.reviewed and approved by the City Arborist and also received conditional approval from the ARC. Subsequent to the ARC meeting one additional cork oak tree has been identified for removal at the intersection of Palm Street — Osos Street. This tree is being removed due to the elevations of the brick pavers and the creation of the public sitting bench on the intersection corner. Staff proposes mitigation of this removal by augmenting the location with 3 additional trees (jacaranda) at the intersection or replacing the cork oak in kind. Council Agenda Report—Downtown Transit Center—Plans and Specifications Page 3 Funding Limitations &Loss The DTC Improvement project is funded via a $600,000 capital grant from the Federal Transit Administration that included a City commitment of $150,000 of matching funds for a total project budget of$750,000. FTA grant guidelines require that the monies be spent for the already approved DTC Improvement project or not at all. Therefore, a "use it or lose it" provision regarding the existing funding prevails. In addition, the grant is quite old and must be drawn down upon soon or the money will lapse back to the FTA. None of the existing FTA monies can be assigned to the NARF project. At its meeting of 12/15/1998 the City Council created the DTC project and allocated$500,000 of the FTA grant and $125,000 in TDA towards the project budget. Subsequent to that time an additional transfer of $35,000 has been added to the budget to cover the Insite design costs. Therefore to date, Council has appropriated $660,000 for this project. Timing of the NARF Transit project As mentioned previously, the DTC was envisioned to serve the City's transit needs for the next 15-20 years i.e. until full build-out of the City. The eventual location was to be near the railroad at the RTC site. Given the recent NARF study, it may be that the ultimate transit transfer center may remain downtown — on one of eight different layouts presented to the Council in a separate agenda packet. Even if Council adopts some form of a NARF Transit component at its meeting of March 13, 2001, development and construction of that project is a minimum of 4-5 years away (and most likely 5-10) and will take consistent support of many successive City Council in order to reach fruition. This is primarily due to the fact that additional studies will need to be performed in order to acquire the site, an environmental impact report will probably be necessary to meet NEPA (if Federal funds are applied for and received) and CEQA requirements, and only then can acquisition (using federal dollars), design and construction begin. Property acquisition and relocation issues will also take a very long time to resolve. Identifying and securing enough funding for the total project will require a major work effort in and of itself. Therefore, the likelihood that the DTC will still be needed as an interim facility is very high. Is the money spent to do the DTC improvements just wasted money Staff believes the answer to that question is no. This project is funded and can be built right away and thus provide a better transit transfer center until the long range one is complete. Once the. new transfer facility is in operation, the City will only have to remove the sawtooth sidewalk component of the DTC to provide a wider plaza area adjacent to City Hall. All remaining portions of the project and amenities can remain to benefit the City in general. 3 Council Agenda Report—Downtown Transit Center—Plans and Specifications Page 4 Existing driveway locations of the City Hall parking lot require that SLO Transit use both sides of Osos Street to perform current transfer operations. The current bus stopping locations often lead to unsafe pedestrians movements such as walking in between and around the back of buses during high activity times. The DTC improvements will allow transfers of SLO Transit vehicles to be done on the west side of Osos Street which will increase pedestrian safety dramatically. In addition, the public restrooms, the widened sidewalks and the higher quality shelters will directly improve transit patron use of this area and will lesson the conflict between the City Hall and transit system activities. Finally, even with a regional transfer facility housed at a NARF center location, there will likely still be the need to have buses, vanpools and carpools access the immediate vicinity of the City Hall to load and unload commute passengers. The proposed DTC improvements could be used for these activities with little impact to the proposed design of City Hall functions. Because of these issues staff is recommending that the DTC project go forward to construction subject to the funding changes that Council may deem appropriate as part of consideration of this issue. CONCURRENCES The project has received NEPA and CEQA environmental review; has received approval from the State office for Historical Preservation (SHPO). The project received conditional approval of from the Architectural Review Commission on March 15, 1999. FISCAL IMPACT As stated earlier, the City Council created the DTC project on 12/15/1998 and allocated $500,000 of the FTA grant and $125,000.in TDA towards the project budget. Subsequent to that time an additional transfer of$35,000 has been added to the budget to cover portions of the Insite design costs. Therefore to date, Council has appropriated $660,000 for this project Even with a FTA grant budget of $750,000; transit funds would not be able to cover the full construction costs estimated for the project. 1999-2001 CEP Budget Appropriating the remaining $100,000 in the FTA grant at his time will increase the available construction budget for this project to $721,000. Current Budget Total: $660,000 Encumbrances: Council Agenda Report—Downtown Transit Center—Plans and Specifications Page 5 (Insite design contract with contingency) $39,000 Remaining for Construction: $6219000 Leftover FTA Grant.Appropriation: $100,000 Total Remaining for Construction: $7219000 Insite Design has now provided a construction estimate to construct all four major components of the DTC in the amount of$ 800,000. Construction Estimate Architect's Construction Base Estimate: $597,000 Restrooms' $46,000 Intersection Improvements: $84,000 Total Architect Estimate: $7279000 Construction Contingency(12%): $73,000 Total Construction Cost Estimate: $8009000 Total Remaining for Construction: $721,000 CONSTRUCTION SHORTFALL: $79,000 What has led to this shortfall? First, project construction has been delayed approximately two years to address the NARF issue and as a result, is encountering current construction cost levels that are substantially higher than when the project budget was approved. Second, General.Fund monies for the City Hall Parking Lot improvements that are not the responsibility of the DTC project never got budgeted. Given the current bid climate, staff specifically asked the architect to verify these current cost amounts so as to reduce the likelihood that their estimate would be exceeded when bid results came in. Thus, individual construction cost estimates have been made using conservative estimation techniques and also were verified by an independent estimator to verify their validity to the current market. Staff is proposing to close the funding shortfall for this project using two mechanisms: increase some funding and decrease some project components. First, and most obviously, is to budget for the City's portion of the parking lot project. The cost estimate of the total parking lot improvements is $127,225. However, staff estimates that 35% of that cost can be directly attributable to transit related impacts (for example new driveways are Council Agenda Report—Downtown Transit Center—Plans and Specifications Page 6 required because of the DTC). As such approximately $82,696 would normally be the General Fund's responsibility for this project. Since this amount exceeds the remaining shortfall, only $79,000 of general fund monies should be appropriated at this time to cover the remaining gap in funding. The supplemental funding needed for this project is not available within existing resources. As such, we recommend appropriating $79,000 from the unreserved General Fund balance. Based . on the Mid-Year Budget Review for 2000-01 and Council-approved changes since then, this will result in an ending fund balance that is 26% of operating expenditures compared with our policy minimum of 20%. Additionally, this will reduce the estimated carryover balance available for FY 2001-03 to $1.5 million. Revised Construction Budget Current Construction Budget: $621,000 Leftover FTA Grant Appropriation: $100,000 Additional GF Appropriation: $79,000 Revised Construction Budget: $9009000 Second, the city has had a recent rash of many CIP projects coming in severely over budget. This was demonstrated most recently by the downtown public restroom project on Broad Street, which came in quite a bit higher than expected. While staff believes that the current architect estimate has taken this into consideration, staff is proposing the following remedy to this issue. Staff is proposing to bid the DTC project as a whole however; the public restroom component will be bid as a deductive alternative. In this manner; if the public restroom component of the bid comes in at an extremely high amount, they may be deleted and the remaining project awarded within revised budget estimates. While this may be inconvenient, transit patrons would continue to use the public restroom facilities in City Hall as they do today, which would not impact transit service levels or the SLO Transit system. The project would be constructed such that the restrooms could be constructed at a latter time when additional funding becomes available. If the Council decides that a NARF type transit facility ultimately gets built in the downtown, the need for these restrooms along Osos Street will be less in the long term timeframe and the City Hall restrooms should be sufficient to carryover the SLO Transit patrons until the NARF facility is built. ALTERNATIVES a. Decide not to build the DTC project. This alternative would delete the project from the City's CIP program and shelve the current plans and specifications. This would provide a small increase in currently programmed TDA (Transit Enterprise Funds); which could be reallocated for other transit purposes. However, staff does not recommend this alternative for J Council Agenda Report—Downtown Transit Center—Plans and Specifications Page 7 three reasons: 1) existing safety.and operational issues at the Osos Street center dictate that some sort of improvement take place to improve transit operations, 2) current FTA capital grant money would be lost and could not be recovered for a different project, and 3) there will probably be long-term needs for some facility on Osos Street for transfer purposes. B. Defer the DTC improvements until a later time. Council could choose to defer making improvements to the Osos Street center and wait until such time as other issues, such as NARF, are pursued. Staff does not recommend this alternative because the current federal grant monies will lapse due to time deadlines and if the Council chooses to complete the project at a later time, significant additional funding will be required to be earmarked for the project. B. Direct staff to modify the DTC project to delete.individual components. The Council could choose to modify or delete select component of the DTC project. An example of this would be deletion of the proposed intersection improvements to meet the proposed budget amount. Staff does not recommend this as an alternative because the current bid climate makes it difficult to estimate where bids will come in at and removing the intersection components prior to bid removes flexibility if the bids come in lower than expectation. ATTACHMENTS Attachment A - DTC Site Plan Plans and Specifications are available in the Council office for review. I:caddtcadv car ■ NM I � flis Ml o 1 a1�tlr�ik✓�' i�:l� �' � � 1 '� �l t Tf7••7J�� 4S � - i f. t mcciin�J /3-Ot n�trouA ITENI ;�� t— OU CIL G- ;DI AO ❑FIN D: Honorable Mayor and City Council, a�D O FIR From: Dave Romero eu�m Ev ❑FV4 a. eRKIORIG O POLLSubject: Osos St. Transfer Center ❑MCMT ara O PEC D1O PE DO PERS Need With a Council decision to move ahead rapidly to develop a Transfer Center at a much better location (Shell Site), it is simply a waste of $3/4 million to develop this site for 4-5 years use. After Transit operations have been relocated, this site would have to be modified again to serve parking and traffic needs near City Hall. Parking Loses Not mentioned by staff in the agenda report is the loss of 6 metered spaces on Osos Street. To replace these (and the 4 lost by redoing the parking lot) would cost about $200,000 (10 x $20,000/space). The City would lose about $6,000/yr in meter revenue, and the neighborhood businesses would lose much needed parking. Safety Access and egress .to the City Hall Lot is currently from Osos St. which has slow speed traffic because of stop signs at each end of the block. The proposed plan shows access and egress from Mill St. which is a Collector Street with much higher traffic speeds. This exposes all users of the lot to greater risk. Restrooms City Hall, the Library and the Courthouse have ample restrooms to serve this area of the city when those buildings are open. After bus operations are shifted to a new site, there is simply no need for additional restrooms in the area to serve after business hours. The new restroomss proposed to be constructed for $46,000 would probably be closed to save the substantial maintenance and repair cost. Funding It is my recollection that FTA funds were transferred to the City Hall Project when the City was unable to come to terms with Stan Clinton for a site on Higuera St. Since our latest plan returns to that block for a Transfer Center, I believe a good argument could be made to transfer the funds back to purchase an adjacent site. The "Use it or Lose It " approach puts the Council once again in a very awkward position, but even if staff is correct and we lose the grant, maybe the City should Lose it rather than moving ahead with this ill-conceived proj ect. Final Comments I urge the Council to reject the staff recommendation and direct staff to move forward instead with much needed maintenance and repair of existing RECEIVED facilities. MAR 1 2 2001 SLO CITY COUNCIL