MTD Updates

Two updates on the MTD, one from their recent board meeting and a bidding error in the paper. First from the board meeting: 

The MTD board approved hiring a consultant for their part of "The Yards" project:

MTD board OKs hiring consultant to review plans for downtown development
The Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District is set to hire a consultant for $72,000 to review contracts and agreements related to an expansion of the Illinois Terminal building and other parts of a massive redevelopment project planned for downtown Champaign...

Chicago-based Cotter Consulting Inc. will be hired by the MTD to help make sure transit district and taxpayer interests are protected in a $200 million-plus project called The Yards, in which the city and private developers are also involved...

The MTD hopes to eventually secure grant funding to foot part of the cost of the terminal expansion.

The MTD would be financially involved in only parts of The Yards project — those including an expanded bus platform, renovation and expansion of the existing Illinois Terminal building, a parking structure and a mixed-use retail and office building being developed through a partnership agreement.

The full article is here. The article previewing the meeting explained how this approval fits in upcoming consideration for the MTD's role in the project:

Hiring a consultant is a significant step toward moving this project ahead, he said...

He'll be looking for further commitment from the MTD board at a special district board meeting April 15, he said.

That meeting will be intended to firm up MTD's part of The Yards project and secure the board's commitment to that before sharing it with the Champaign City Council at a later date, Gnadt said.

That full article is available here. This all comes in the aftermath of the MTD losing out on two grant opportunities it was hoping could go towards its portion of the project. The sense has always been that more grant opportunities would present themselves, so the project was still viewed optimistically. More on that at a News-Gazette article from January and a Cheat Sheet post after the last grant fell through here.

Tom's Mailbag had a quick Q and A on that MTD contract bidding error in last week's Tom's Mailbag:

"Last week in The News-Gazette, I read a classified ad placed by the C-U MTD, requesting competing bids for remodeling and replacement of a portion of their repair facilities. The notice was given on a single day only, and the bids were due less than a week later Further, there was a prebid meeting available for bidders, but the meeting date was the day before the notice was given. Is this a normal practice of the C-U MTD, and aren't there laws limiting public entities from operating like this?"

Karl Gnadt, the managing director at the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District, has your answer: "Before this question arrived, we had already released an amendment to the RFP to extend the due date, as there was an error that occurred with the timing of the notice in the paper.

"It may turn out that we end up scrapping this timeline and start over. We are discussing this with the architect and the proposers who have received the RFP. However, the architect on the job had directly sent the RFP to five proposers well in advance of the publication and has had contact with an additional two since then. At the same time that the RFP was sent to known eligible proposers, the notice was posted on the web."

The full Mailbag article is available here.