Events surrounding the building of a convention center hotel just keep making Shreveport Mayor Keith Hightower look sillier and sillier. The bids for its construction have gone out and just two came back – one nearly 15 percent higher that the city expected, the other almost 50 percent higher.
This creates an immense practical and another immense political cost to the project. Concerning the former, the speediest option is a negotiation with the low bidder to reduce costs through materials and design changes. Given the over $4 million gap existing, this inevitably means that materials changes alone are not going to close that. It means there will have to be fewer rooms – this regarding a project that no study ever has shown that it would be a money-maker, so reducing the number of rooms will make it even harder to prevent taxpayers from footing the bill.
The other option would be to redesign and rebid the project, but that is even worse. Not only would that also likely result in fewer rooms, but it also runs up against a looming political consideration – state Sen. Max Malone’s SB 260 which would put the brakes on Shreveport’s financing and building of the hotel. It would force a vote of the citizenry of Shreveport (the only government in the state to which the law would apply) in order to sell bonds for or to allow construction to begin on projects for which bonds were sold.
As far as this goes, it has become a race between Malone’s ability to get this bill enacted into state law and Hightower’s ability to get construction started (not to mention the mayor’s race against the judiciary which has before it a lawsuit to declare the state’s contribution of $12 million to the $52 million project illegal). A renegotiation could take up to a month; a rebid much longer.
Meanwhile, even as the head of the local contractor’s association and City Councilman Mike Gibson points out the typical job of this size might attract a half-dozen bids, city Chief Administrative Officer Ken Antee cautions us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain:
Antee said that there were negative connotations placed on the project by people in the construction community but that their efforts were unsuccessful."It's obvious that people with agendas against Mayor Hightower and the hotel have been trying to poison the well," he said. "But based on the bids, I don't think it had any impact."
That Antee can argue contractors would rather score political points that make a ton of money off this project, and that only two bidders wildly over the city’s estimate constitutes a successful process shows he possesses a rare combination of chutzpah and gallows optimism akin to a man in front of a firing squad who, when asked whether he wanted a last cigarette to go with his blindfold said, “No, thanks, I’m quitting smoking.”
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