Once again, the City is bamboozled, bullshitted and lied to by an overpriced consultant who ends up being wildly wrong about costs when the bidding rolls around. We’ve seen this MANY times: Old City Hall remodel, the mountain bike park, Business Pork project, skate park, Hostess House, etc.
Of course, there are never any repercussions or even stern words for the offending “experts” that the City handed tens of thousands of dollars to. Instead, the city just bends over and takes another couple hundred grand of pipe up their ass and says “thank you sir! May I have another??”
Want to hear the latest?? Here it is!
Back in May of 2022,the City was drowning in “Covid” money and couldn’t dream up useless, wildly overpriced projects fast enough. Skate park, Hostess House ‘facelift,’ this Wayfinding signage project: ALL of them were birthed around 2022. We also had an extremely weak and quasi-retarded group of people running City council at that time: TJ Monroe as mayor, Bob Goodart, Kuehne, Williamson, etc.
When you throw piles of ‘free’ money at chimpanzees, it’s inevitable you end up with multiple abortions as a result. The Wayfinding Signage idea is just such an abortion.
This was the general idea [see page 29-40]:
They wanted to “create an interpretive wayfinding signage program for downtown that is integrated with other City signage.”
Naturally, they showed an example of their idea: from the City of Arlington Texas! A city with a population roughly 60 times larger than Lampasas. Makes total sense!
By October of 2022,the geniuses running the City (Finley, Sims and ‘staff’) made the recommendation to go with Studio 16:19, a Round Rock company [see page 65]. Other bidders for this project included Design Workshop (Austin, TX), KMA Design (Carnegie PA), FSG (Austin, TX), and Mijksenaar (New York, NY). They had plenty of interest in this project. Competition that SHOULD have produced a good price and quality work.
Yes, that is $60,000 to sit around and design signs. You’d ALSO think that price would include accurate estimates of the COST of the final signage product. But you’d be very wrong, as you’ll see by what happened next.
The Dispatch Even had a big article on it!
City Moves Forward With Wayfinding Plan [10/14/22]
The company quoted a rough estimate of $59,000, which would not include the price of the signs.
Councilwoman Catherine Kuehne asked if the price seemed reasonable compared to that of other businesses and what the city might expect for the fee.
“Those that did provide a cost were very similar in cost,” Sims said. Sims said the fee included “analysis, schematic designs, development and programming, documentation of the bid process and construction,” as well as administration and oversight of the construction project. She added that some communities spend between $1 million and $2 million for a Wayfinding Master Plan”
Fast forward to July of 2024: the wizards at Stupido 16:19 declared this project would cost about $170,000 based on similar projects. This amount of money for signs is ludicrous all by itself, if you ask me. Remember: Stupido 16:19 is going to also pocket $60,000 for their “expertise.”
The bids came in and guess what? The project will cost either $455,000 or $575,000 depending on which of the two bids are accepted [see page 15].
WHOOPS! Now where have we seen that kind of wildly wrong estimating before?
Oh yeah….
So now it’s “back to the drawing board” once again…just like the Hostess House debacle. They will “redefine scope,” etc, etc and then come back and tell us it will “only” cost $350,000 and that we are getting a bargain – despite the fact that is STILL DOUBLE the original cost estimate. See how that works?