Last Monday,  City Council voted to approve the next phase to pay the architect to begin drawings for a new City Hall, Police, Courts Facility project, which I argued had not been sufficiently specified.
Arbor update paraphrases EASTHOPE: “nobody objected to costs of maintenance facility; courts and police are important; citizens rate them as more important than anything else, including parks”

I have to believe that there are many costs to which we should object, based on what I have seen. Unfortunately, many people seem to not really care if things end up costing tens of millions more than they should or could.

I never once challenged the police courts facility during the meeting. I focused on the Civic Center and the fact that no one could really define the target market for a “public space” and whether this would be built to meet the needs of citizens, who could not afford hotel meeting rooms, or whether we’d include facilities for catering to end up competing with hotels. Some have questioned why I brought up the parking facility. Regardless of which allocation will include it, a parking facility is being planned. Just because it is not part of a specific allocation is no reason to not discuss whether we as a City are planning things that are really needed or the places they should be located.

Easthope said that if I had not missed meetings and answered my email, then I would have had my questions answered. But, I am not being paid to be the project manager, and this is not about me getting my questions answered. This is about the architect getting answers as to whether we should be planning a Civic Center and what purpose it should serve before beginning to implement. I have practiced and done corporate training for requirements gathering and project management for over 20 years. I know very well that requirements gathering is difficult and that the client typically cannot easily express what it is that they want. This is why a million dollars for the architect should have been used to better determine these answers - not for me, but for the project.
What I asked for at the beginning of the meeting, was that, since we had decided to schedule an extra meeting, perhaps we should use that time to actually discuss what some of these undefined features would be. But, with the exception of Marcia Higgins, everyone of the other “yes” voters stuck to their talking points about police and courts. It was very much like those who support our troops and end up being supportive of a trillion dollar debt to fund the war in Iraq. “Do you support our police or not?” Never mind if the taxpayer gets fleeced in the process.
This Council session, showed no interest in talking about what a Civic Center should be. So, now we will pay millions of dollars to include drawings of something, which is in part ill defined. This is at least true of the Civic Center and it makes me suspicious of others aspects of the larger plan.

My biggest complaint about the way things seem to run in the City is that there is so little discussion about process improvement. On Monday, I did not expect that the City Hall, Police, Courts facility project would end. What I had hoped for was that we might actually be able to talk about how to make it at least be a little more efficient. But, again, with the exception of Marcia Higgins, the rest of the “yes” voters move in lock step fashion, repeating the same statements about space for police with no thought about how we make that possible in a more efficient manner. It all reminds me of Stanley Milgram’s experiments on “Obedience to Authority” and how an ordinary person might follow the requests of Nazi type authority figures under the right circumstances. It would be refreshing to see a little more thinking and less of a bunker mentality on Council, where people repeat their talking points, but no real discussion occurs.
Quinn Evans was awarded a contract to gather requirements for a project that was supposed to cost around $34 Million. Their deliverable was for a project between $50 and $60 Million. Frankly, I still don’t know who is driving this out of control bus or why and who will be reaping the benefits other than the architects and contractors. Was this like a market where the vendor says 57, you say 34 and then you end up settling for a number in between? If so, why pay for architectural drawings of something we don’t want? Why not finish defining what it is we want to build first and then move to implementation?

Do we as a community have so much wealth that we don’t need to care about whether we do things efficiently? I know Ann Arborites approve more taxes than other communities. Does an extra $20 Million slapped onto a plan not matter to people in Ann Arbor?

I said at the beginning of the meeting, that while I had been opposed to the project as a whole, I thought it would probably pass despite my “no” vote. And, I had hoped that as a group we could discuss how to be a little more efficient. I did not see any real evidence of attempting to control costs in the “design committee” meetings I attended. People discussed cutting 10% or 20%, as if by some magic stroke of the pen, then things would cost less. When I was asked in the “design committee” what percent cut I would like, I cynically replied “80% - what basis do I have for making a cut?” The architect did talk about some substantive materials changes that might save money. But, what has been missing is a discussion by the “policy makers” - the City Council members - as to what we were building and why - at least with respect to the Civic Center.

The biggest problem I have seen is that there is so little concern about how efficiently we do things in the City. Yes, the staff numbers have been cut and that saves money. But, I have yet to hear someone other than Marcia Higgins, Bob Johnson, Steve Kunselman and the mayor talk to me about how to save money. There should either be people on staff whose job it is to promote more efficient planning or Council needs to have their own administrative assistants to do the work necessary to counter the steam roller that spends our tax dollars with so little regard to the taxpayer.
I am trying to grow my web consulting practice and I sure hope that I can find clients as easy as the City of Ann Arbor when I hand in requirements specifications nearly double the price of what the client requested and then get the funding for an implementation phase without any regard for the specifics of how the costs would be reduced or how the functionality and purpose of the project would be redefined to meet the budget.