F-Line to Dudley
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Are we talking about change orders? I thought they dropped the design team and the plan is for new bids for the stations. So they are either moving forward with designs as-is or we are talking about a complete redesign, which I agree is probably not worthwhile unless you can achieve something like a 4x cost savings.
Bids for construction, not design. The final designs have been complete for a long time now, so there's no cost savings in going back to that drawing board. So to reopen the designs for anything means the new bidders can start racking up change order fees.
But what were the design costs to begin with? Can someone find those numbers?
Spent to-date, or estimated? Estimates are probably on the GLX project site, and dated enough that they'd be non-final (not that design has changed dramatically in the last 5+ years). Unless Baker/Pollack do a document dump with a detailed line itemization, not sure spent-to-date design money is broken out of a lump to be able to calculate stations vs. ROW vs. rail hardware. For state budgets they usually just list "DESIGN - $Xx,xxx,xxx" with totals per fiscal year.
From what I heard on the radio this morning Pollack is calling on stakeholders (ie Somerville, private developers) to step forward with money for GLX. At this point that means no redesign, as-is with the remaining parts of the project to be bid out hopefully at less than what has been estimated.
Yes. And that's because it's less to take the existing design untouched and re-bid it airtight from corruption rather than start over or start making new changes. It's when they get the re-bids that lop 40-50% off that you actually can influence meaningful swings in remaining project cost by targeting features that can be tweaked without change orders. It's pointless to do that before you have bids because...say...finding $20M in pure cosmetic empty calories to squeeze out of all of the stations put together doesn't amount to a hill of beans from a starting point of $2B. It's more tempting to go fishing after the re-bid knocks it back to $1B first.
Process-wise, Pollack can't approach it any other way.
The question then becomes what happens if Somerville doesn't come up with money. We can probably table this entire discussion about station redesign until that point, but I have a feeling Somerville is going to come back and say no and play a high stakes and ultimately futile game of chicken with the governor. At which point there needs to be a plan B otherwise this project is going further down the rabbit hole of endless delays.
A municipality can't come up with the money, so that's an easy one. Furthermore, they can't suddenly start coming up with the money in 2016 with no warning after 20 years of not being asked to do that. So state's being just a wee disingenuous there. I think if Somerville is to assume more responsibility you'd be talking things like streetscaping, traffic pattern alterations on the roadways in front of stations, or the Community Path. As mentioned in the last post, the Path is served up by the retaining walls...so it's baked into the GLX design and definitely isn't something you want to change-order. So maybe some funding for the actual landcaping of what goes on top of those walls shifts to the city and away from DCR or whoever was picking up that tab.
Not huge expenses, just finishing work that a city DPW of their size is capable of taking on. "Plug our billion-dollar debt or pick up a shovel and help us build a transit line" isn't something a municipality can do. But I think the state knows that.
Also...maybe a little more Tufts love at College Ave. But design-wise I don't think there's a whole lot on the station plot they can do. That big footbridge they're building is all off-property and not coupled to anything pre-existing about the station's design. Route 16 station (if we're thinking that far ahead) is probably the one that Tufts fun bux can pick up a bigger portion of, since they're buying up that whole adjacent block of Boston Ave. to sit on in anticipation of the TOD windfall.