Mitchell Park Domes
Supervisor calls contractor’s proposal ‘a plan to nowhere.’
A contractor’s proposal to restore the Mitchell Park Domes has drawn the ire of a county supervisor, who feels the contractor has produced a proposal so complex it’s impossible to implement.
“I think that the consultant we hired is basically ripping off county government,” Supervisor Sheldon Wasserman said after a meeting Monday of the county’s Finance and Audit Committee, at which he criticized the proposal.
He said the plan from ArtsMarket, a firm that specializes in cultural and heritage feasibility and planning, doesn’t make sense.
“It’s not the plan for the future, it’s a plan to nowhere,” he said.
The committee was considering a resolution to spend $100,000 to bring in outside legal and fiscal experts to evaluate ArtsMarket’s plan and design and recommend a process moving forward.
Wasserman critiqued the resolution as spending money on consultants to study another consultant’s report. And he criticized the oversight and direction provided by the Mitchell Park Conservatory Domes task force. He voted for it, saying afterward that the analysis would prove the plan is a failure and will reset the debate on the Domes.
ArtsMarket co-principal Louise Stevens said there was no basis to Wasserman’s comments. She said that her firm was given specific direction by County Executive Chris Abele and others to find a way to pay for rehabilitation and continued operation of the Domes with no cost to the county. That created the need to put together a complex method of paying for the project and exhaust every potential except bonding, she said.
The ultimate plan from ArtsMarket
calls for investing $66 million to revitalize Mitchell Park for the next 50 years. The plan did end up including some level of county financing.
About $13.5 million would come from the county through bonding, about $13.5 million from private donations and the remaining $39 million from tax credits and opportunity zone investments.
Stevens also said that other complex civil infrastructure projects have come together with a mix of financing similar to what was proposed for the Domes.
“We delivered exactly what we were required to do and requested to do,” she said, adding that it’s easy to blame a consultant.
At Monday’s meeting, Corporation Counsel Margaret Daun said her office wasn’t clear on the scope of ArtsMarket’s mandate.
“We’re not certain that it was designed to come up with an immediately actionable, detailed business plan to be marketed to the potential private sector partners that we would need — or if it was to find some potential, hypothetical route,” she said. “Those are very different mandates, and my office cannot decipher whether the mandate was the former or the latter.”
Stevens said her firm clearly explained that additional planning was needed and that using tax credits requires detailed planning.
The county has spent $158,000 on the contract with ArtsMarket.
Supervisor Jason Haas, a member of the task force, told the committee that the group’s work was stalled by conflicts with Abele’s administration and that the measure before the committee Monday was to determine the feasibility of a “remarkable proposal.”
Haas said after the meeting the task force chairman chose the consultants, who came up with the proposal that offers “levels of ingenuity that we never would have come up with here.”
“It’s exciting to me because it revitalizes the entire park, it doesn’t just focus on the Domes,” he said.
He acknowledged that the proposal is complex but said this isn’t a simple issue. Haas said the county needs the expertise of people who focus on these narrow issues as included in the resolution before the committee.
Taskforce Chairman William Lynch did not immediately respond to a voicemail seeking comment Monday.