Finally, all the broken eggs on the east end of the Downtown Mall are beginning to resemble an omelet. What looked like one big construction site outside City Hall is actually three separate projects—the Charlotte-sville Pavilion has played host to more big-time performers in the past month than the town has seen in the past year, and the Free Expression Monument will soon provide a place for all the concertgoers to chalk up their reviews. And rounding out the trio, there’s the bus transfer center.
Bus transfer center? Yeah, that’s the patch of dirt just southwest of the Pavilion. Although construction has yet to begin and isn’t scheduled to be finished until next summer, the price tag for the bus transfer center and the newly bricked plaza is already $10 million—well beyond the City’s original cost estimates of about $6 million. (These costs do not include the Charlottesville Pavilion.)
Though it will be the last piece of the east end redevelopment, the bus transfer center is actually the catalyst that prompted all that building in the first place. The City has been planning to build the transfer center for almost 10 years, using federal and State transportation grants.
Since the City received federal money in the mid-1990s, Council has been plotting to build a bus transfer center somewhere in Charlottesville. In 2001, Council ramped up its marketing campaign to convince a skeptical public that we really did need a bus transfer center—a place where all the City’s buses would line up. Passengers could change buses, perhaps buy a cup of coffee while they wait.
Council started to claim that the bus transfer center would improve local transit by making the bus riding experience more stylish; Council also hired a pricey Philadelphia architecture firm to woo Downtown business owners with sketches of a modern building brimming with potential customers. Now Council’s pitch seems, at best, half-true.
The Pavilion, which is privately owned by Dave Matthews Band manager and super-developer Coran Capshaw, seems like a win for music fans and for Downtown businesses. It certainly could be a bottom-line boost for Capshaw and other Downtown real estate holders. Now that the renderings and PowerPoint presentations are turning into bricks and concrete, however, it’s not clear that the bus transfer center will do anything to improve the City’s transit system.
Cooking up federal pork
Alternative transportation. Pedestrian-friendly development. Public transit. Connectivity. Just the kind of high-minded crap Charlottesville loves to talk about.
These have long been favorite catchphrases for City planners, especially since the mid-1990s. That’s when the design firm of Torti Gallas conducted its “corridor study,” which recommended that the City redevelop major portions of W. Main Street, Cherry Avenue, Preston Avenue and Fifth Street Extended. The emphasis Torti Gallas placed on taller buildings, higher densities and a mix of residential and commercial uses in these corridors is common to what’s known in planning parlance as “New Urbanism.”
While City officials talk about New Urbanism as a way to “reduce traffic” and “improve quality of life,” high-density infill development has another selling point that often goes unsaid—“cash flow.” For City officials facing rising budgets for social services, public works and police protection, New Urbanism is seen as a way to grow Charlottesville and boost property tax revenue.
The problem with “New Urbanism” is the “new.” Developers are notoriously conservative, preferring to build in styles that have sold before, and they are wary of ideas that have not been tested in the marketplace. In recent years, Council has been anxious to jump-start New Urbanist redevelopment. That’s where the bus transfer center comes in.
“The bus transfer center started out as a development project,” says City Councilor Kevin Lynch. At first, Council wanted to build a bus transfer center on the parking lot near the Amtrak station, hoping it would spur development along W. Main Street.
“The idea rose out of a study of W. Main Street that was done in the early 1990s,” says former mayor David Toscano, who led the transfer center project and is now running for Mitch Van Yahres’ seat in the General Assembly. “The station had been in disrepair for a long time, and we saw it as an opportunity to do something positive there. So we applied for grant money.”
The City secured federal money through the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991. Known as ISTEA, such grants give local governments money to build projects that incorporate a variety of transportation modes. By aiming for a bus transfer center at the Amtrak station, the City could claim that the project brought together buses and trains—that it was truly intermodal. The City, however, could not reach an agreement with Gabe Silverman, a developer who owns the Amtrak property. The deal fell through in 2001.
Toscano says City officials worried that the federal government would take back the grant money, which amounted to about $6 million by the time the Amtrak deal fell through. “We weren’t sure when the deadline was,” says Toscano, “but the feeling was that we could lose the money.
Hard sell
With $6 million in Uncle Sam’s money burning a hole in its pocket and an apparent deadline looming, City Council decided to skip the hassle of cutting deals with private landowners, and instead planned to build the bus transfer center on land it already owned. Where? The east end of the Downtown Mall, just outside City Hall.
By 2002, the City had money and land. Now it needed to convince people that Charlottesville needed a bus transfer center.
Council’s sales pitch, led by former mayor and urban design advocate Maurice Cox, began in earnest in early 2002. “It will take a political will of steel to get this through,” Cox predicted that March.
The first step was to introduce people to slick drawings of a redeveloped east end from the Philadelphia architecture firm Wallace Roberts & Todd. The City spent $650,000 of the grant money on the WRT designs presented for public comment during a series of meetings in March 2002. Although the City only had $6 million to spend on the east end project, early drawings called for a 280-space underground parking garage to be built below the former amphitheater at a projected cost of $15 million.
It was clear, however, that the City would never be able to afford much of what WRT proposed, and that the plans would probably be useful only as a dust magnet on a shelf in City Hall. Meanwhile, the City paid WRT for a host of other drawings—a complete redesign of W. Main Street and the Mall and its side streets. Also purchased: plans for Preston Commons, another New Urbanist project intended for Preston Avenue and championed by Cox that was killed when Preston business owners objected.
Toscano says that at the time, he had “really large concerns” about all the money the City was spending for designs that might never get built. “Suffice it to say that there were people on the Council very interested in design issues,” Toscano says, “and very interested in WRT.” Cox, who was a Councilor from 1996 to 2004 and mayor from 2002 to 2004, did not return calls.
Now, Councilors who previously supported WRT’s east end designs are stepping back.
“The quality of architecture is not worth those dollars,” Councilor Blake Caravati says these days. He was mayor when WRT began presenting its designs for the east end of the Mall.
“It took several iterations of designs from WRT to get us to the point where we are now,” says Lynch, who also supported the transit center project. “For months they kept presenting us these projects that were much larger than we could afford. They kept saying, ‘Here’s what you can do with $15 million, here’s what you can do for $10 million.’ What should have been a $700,000 design effort ended up being a $1.3 million design effort.”
The public, however, didn’t seem to be buying it. Council created a steering committee headed by Toscano to secure buy-in from the public—especially Downtown business owners. In a series of public meetings, Mall advocates led by David RePass argued against City plans to close Seventh Street as part of the redevelopment, and claimed that a transfer center would not improve the bus system.
“Who thinks we need more time to think this out?” RePass asked at a meeting on May 8, 2002. When about half the attendees raised their hands, architect Giovanna Galfione, Cox’s wife, asked: “Who thinks we’ve seen enough, and that it’s time to get on with it?” The other half raised their hands. The push was on.
At a June 2002 Council meeting, for example, Cox argued that the building would “give transportation a face,” and that people should see the transfer center “as a major step forward.” Lynch, however, countered that the building would not add much to the usefulness of the transit system, and Helen Poore, then-director of Charlottesville Transit Service, agreed. “Increase in ridership,” she said, according to meeting minutes, “is more related to actual service improvements.”
Bigger is not better
Now that construction is set to start on the bus transfer center in earnest, the building and other improvements are projected to cost an additional $4 million.
Cost estimates shifted throughout the years of planning. In 2003, a Philadelphia company called International Consultants, Inc. estimated that it would cost $5.7 million to build the center as WRT designed it. The City asked another company, Barton Marlow, for a second opinion; that company estimated it would actually cost about $6.2 million. In response, the City asked WRT to scale down the transfer center.
Cost estimates continued to shift. In August 2004, International Consultants estimated it would cost $7.3 million for the center, site grading and utility work. Three months later, the same company estimated that the work would cost $5.4 million.
“We’ve gone through a number of ‘value engineering’ processes to try to cut costs,” says City Public Works Director Judith Mueller. “We changed materials and components of the building to hold down costs. It’s just a part of construction today.” For example, WRT originally envisioned a restaurant in the transfer center. That feature has been reduced to a coffee shop.
Toscano says that in hindsight, Council should have been more firm with WRT regarding budget constraints. “They were trying to think really long term,” Toscano says. “The public stood up and said, ‘We don’t like this.’ The steering committee didn’t like it either. Several times throughout the process, the center was scaled down in size and cost.”
In April 2004, the City opened bidding for the transfer center; according to City documents, the lowest bidder was Daniel and Company, which pledged to build the center for $5.2 million. By that time, the City had accrued a total of $6.7 million in federal money; however, the entire east end project—including the transfer center and improvements to Seventh Street—is projected to cost $10.5 million (again, this total does not include the Charlottesville Pavilion).
In June of this year, the City appropriated an extra $3.8 million to cover the cost overrun. That total includes $3 million from the Federal Transit Administration, $100,000 from the Virginia Department of Transportation, and another $600,000 in other State funds.
While the transfer center was originally promoted as a project that would stimulate public transit, it now seems that the project is drawing money that could be better spent on actually improving the bus system.
“We don’t know whether Charlottes-ville would have received the $3 million FTA grant for another project besides the transfer center,” says Lynch, but “not finishing the center has precluded us from moving forward and getting new projects lined up. There’s no guarantee that the FTA would have given us that money for new projects, but we can’t apply for new projects until we finish [it]. At this point, we’re not even in the game.”
Echoing the City’s party line on the transfer center, Lynch says he thinks the cost overruns are a result of rising construction costs—and perhaps America’s foreign policy.
“When UVA has a lot of construction going on, it makes for a tight bidding environment for us,” says Lynch. He says it’s tough to gauge why construction costs have been going up, but, he says, “probably the biggest effect has just been energy costs. If you look at what’s happened to the price of oil since the invasion…”
Jay Kessler, chief operating officer for local construction magnates R.E. Lee and Son, says it’s hard to say exactly how much construction costs have gone up in the Charlottesville area: “There has been a lot of inflation in construction costs recently. We’re seeing price pressure on anything with a petroleum base—gas, insulation, PVC pipes, conduit, wire insulation, anything with plastics. Plus, there’s a lot of demand for subcontractors to do plumbing, roofing, masonry, wiring. Subcontrac-tors prices control the labor market.”
That may be true, says transportation activist Peter Kleeman—indeed, gas prices soared past the $3 mark following Hurricane Katrina. But Kleeman, a former VDOT engineer who now follows local transportation spending as closely as anyone, doesn’t believe energy costs alone account for the transfer center’s cost overruns.
Kleeman thinks the cost overruns are the result of either bad planning or clever salesmanship. “The City has done very poor planning, and they ended up getting half the building they wanted for twice the money,” he says. “And there’s been a lot of marketing. They underestimate the cost, then they can tell the public, ‘Look, everyone is going to win here.’”