Well, City manager Finley DeGraffenreid appears to be trying to cover his rear end with this skate park debacle. I went into a detailed timeline on this two weeks ago – and now it appears that Finley is (coincidentally!) trying to do the very same with his OWN timeline to try and explain the mess (see page 10 through 19).
The whole section is titled “Discussion regarding design, costs and progression of the Campbell Park Skatepark” – which would leave you to believe it was an explanation about how the skate park went wildly overbudget and is a year overdue. You’d be wrong, of course. That’s because despite the title, Finley spills a good 60% of his ink babbling about the Pavilion project – which is not what we are talking about, is it Finley?
No, we are talking about the skate park debacle.
This is a classic Finley move I have seen many times – he piles a bunch of other shit onto what is being talked about to obfuscate and confuse the issue. More than once, I have been handed 600 or 800 pages of bullshit (at 10 cents per page) I didn’t actually request from the City, and somewhere in that mess is the truth.
He posted 47 different timeline items (page 10 through 19). Of those 47 items, 27 of them make mention of the Pavilion Project, which is a completely different project – they just happen to be in the same general area of the City: Campbell Park.
Why throw in all that extra nonsense? That is what you do when you are a $200,000 per year bureaucrat who has to look busy, busy, busy.
In fact, I think part of the problem was these two SEPARATE projects got intertwined early on. I have no idea why except to maybe make things more complicated later. Clearly Finley can’t walk (pavilion) and chew gum (skate park) at the same time.
In fact, the geo-tech engineers (Langford at cost of $6,400) drilled TWO SEPARATE holes for the geo-tech report for TWO SEPARATE projects.
The very first timeline admissions Finley makes (July 13, 2020 – page 10) is: “skatepark and pavilion have been on the CIP (Capital Improvement Projects) since 2015…the last two years the estimated cost has been $350,000“
He is ALREADY lumping them together to cause confusion. What he SHOULD have said is “skate park $200,000 and pavilion $150,000”, which is what the estimates actually were.
[Ironically, a few builders in town told me they could have done that pavilion project for WAY under the $175,000 they ended up spending]
Here is proof of that…proof that Finley keeps denying and ignoring. He lied right to Cathy “Pork Chop” Kuehne’s face when she asked if the skate park estimate started at $200,000 and he said “no”:
City Manager Tells Blatant Lie To Council Without Blinking
So already, Finley’s OWN little timeline contradicts what he told council about the skate park NEVER being estimated at $200,000. It most certainly was. If the original skate park estimate was $300,000 (as he keeps falsely repeating), then that would mean the pavilion part HAD TO BE only estimated at $50,000 – because, as he just told us, the TWO projects combined estimate was at $350,000.
[Finley pulled this same stunt with the Old City Hall disaster. To this DAY he repeats the lie that it “only” cost $1.02 million when the true cost was around $1.5 million]
He also previously mentioned SPA Skateparks and Lamco as being the top two selected contractors. What he did again was fail to mention that one of those (Lamco) was selected for the pavilion. He was STILL lumping both of these projects together, which not only makes for confusion but makes it almost impossible to separate out the costs for each from his bureaucratic ramblings.
Both projects should have been discussed and priced SEPARATELY from the first day. They weren’t.
But the most damning omission from Finley’s little timeline is to ONCE AGAIN fail to mention New Line Skateparks and why they are involved at all, at this point. Not a SINGLE mention of them in his timeline.
SPA Skateparks was the company selected for this job by Finley himself [December 25, 2020] – NOT New Line Skateparks.
SPA Skateparks is:
“a turnkey, design build contractor of truly successful public spaces through the creation of world class skateparks. Our team of active skateboarders consists of registered landscape architects, engineers, professional skatepark designers, skatepark public planning consultants, skatepark construction managers and specialized skatepark construction crews who have been perfecting site integrated, poured in place concrete skate parks since 2006“
That is straight from the SPA website.
‘Turnkey’ means they do it all. Design, consult, construct….everything.
What SHOULD have happened, is that the City goes to SPA and says “we have $250,000 for a skate park – what can we get for that?”
This is how normal people in the real world operate. If you are in the market for a house, you figure out how much you have to spend, tell a realtor that and they find houses in your price range. Apparently that kind of common sense is absent in Finley’s office, as it is in Misti Talbert’s brain.
SPA has been doing this for 16 years. Don’t tell me that if the City came to them and said “show us our options for $250,000”, they don’t have about a dozen templates to offer up. Templates they have accumulated over the last 16 years of building parks.
Instead, we got a wildly convoluted timeline of delays, cost increases, dropped balls, designs that were never unveiled, and now this “New Line Skateparks” coming out of nowhere to take over the “design” of this thing.
Absolute train wreck. I guess we’ll hear Finley explain it all on Monday night.