A parking study asked for by the City Council has had few interested takers, and the only bid on the study has come in at an exorbitant $210,000.
The Council called for a parking study to be done for the entire City late last year, and the City began work on getting a consultant in place through a Request for Proposals (RFP) process.
However, City Manager Tom Ambrosino said there was only one bidder, Howard Stein Hudson (HSH), and they only bid on a portion of the city rather than the entire city.
“HSH believes that a parking study encompassing the entire City of Chelsea will be too big and likely too expensive of an undertaking,” wrote Ambrosino. “Instead, HSH is proposing that, in addition to the downtown, it would identify only a few other target neighborhoods for study. I don’t know if the Council would be satisfied with that limitation.”
The other piece of the puzzle is the cost.
Ambrosino said the cost of HSH’s limited proposal was $210,780.
“That is much more than we anticipated, and I don’t know if the Council is prepared to expend that sum,” he wrote.
Ambrosino called for the Council to convene subcommittee to talk about next steps. He said they could accept the expensive proposal from HSH, or they could re-big the project and hope to get more proposals.
A date is being set for the committee meeting.
•City Manager Tom Ambrosino is recommending against taking the trash collection operations in-house, a proposal floated by the Council last month.
He said the City’s Department of Public Works had made some initial calculations that showed it would be about the same costs to bring it in-house as it would be to continue using its contractor, Russel Disposal.
“The (figures) make clear that there are no obvious savings by taking the work in-house,” he wrote. “Our best estimate is that annual costs would probably be somewhat greater than what we pay to Russell.”
However, many of the concerns of the Council, including Councilor Enio Lopez, came from the mish-mash quality of pickup.
Ambrosino said he understood those concerns, but didn’t believe taking the operations in-house would improve the mistakes that are made.
“It is my opinion that, given the nature of the trash business, where litter, rough handling of barrels and occasional missed deliveries are inevitable no matter who is performing the work, bringing this work in-house would not demonstrably improve quality, at least not to the extent where any improvement would be noticeable to our residents.”
He said he would not recommend any change.
However, he did not close the door on taking other functions in-house.
He said he isn’t opposed to bringing things like some water and sewer work back in-house.
“I feel strongly that we should probably take in-house certain water, sewer and drainage work that we currently outsource,” he said. “But, in the case of that utility work, I can definitively show that the City will save substantial money doing the work ourselves, and I do believe the quality will be a noticeable improvement to our residents.”
However, he said he doesn’t believe the same to be true for the trash realm.