By Curmudgeon
Yet another interesting Scott Schwebke story in this morning's Standard-Examiner. The story reports that the City Council just approved $750,000 in cost over-run payments for construction at The Junction. From this morning's story:
Three separate items each totaling about $250,000 have pushed The Junction over budget, he said.Two points: first, it's interesting to know that the Mayor and Council did not have a good handle on the cost of installing the Salomon Center's wind tunnel ride when they approved it. Since such rides were already in operation in other places, the ride hardly involved new [and unpriced] technology, so I'm a little hard put to understand why good numbers on installation costs were, somehow, not available to the Mayor and RDA Board. I know, all good construction budgets include an allowance for overages created by changes, price fluctuations and so on, an the overages at The Junction seem not out of line with what is usual for such projects. But the mis-guess on the wind tunnel ride part of it still puzzles me some.
Those items include the removal of buried fuel storage tanks and concrete from the site, construction change orders for work on a parking garage and higher than-expected expenses associated with installation of the iFly skydiving simulator in the Salomon Center.
When original cost estimates were developed for the high-adventure Salomon Center, the city did not have detailed specifications for the portion of the building that houses iFly, Harmer said.
The overruns are expected to exceed funding by less than 2 percent, which is reasonable for a project the size of The Junction, he said.
Second: the rationale for the city putting the taxpayers' money at risk underwriting The Junction construction bonds was that the various businesses going in there would bring new business to the city, create a "high adventure" recreation venue downtown to draw the multitudes to Junction City, and so forth. In light of which, it would be interesting to know how the wind tunnel ride is doing. Making a bundle and bringing in folks from all over the Wasatch Front? Barely making it's operating costs and serving mostly locals? Losing its shirt and not drawing flies? I know, I know, it's a private operation, but given the fact that the city backed the construction bonds for it, seems to me the public has not only an interest, but a right to know if its expectations are being fulfilled. Ditto for the surf ride.
I presume that, if the wind tunnel was going gangbusters, the owners and the Administration would not be shouting that from the rooftops. So the suspicion is that all is not going as well as was hoped. It would be nice to see some hard and fast numbers on this.
