Downtown parking ramp bids above estimate

CEDAR RAPIDS - A new downtown parking ramp costs more than Cedar Rapids officials had thought, and the city is in the process of building two of them.

Five construction firms submitted bids to build a six-story, 460-space parking ramp and skywalk across from a city-owned hotel, arena and convention center. The City Council this week learned that the lowest of the bids is $12.278 million, $778,000 higher than expected.

The council had hoped that the base costs would be low enough to allow for extras to be added to the ramp, including a seventh floor offering 75 more parking spaces, additional first-floor retail spaces on the First Avenue SE side, and nicer exterior siding on the Second Avenue SE side. However, low bidder Knutson Construction Services of Iowa City said the extra ramp floor alone would cost $1.372 million - another $478,000 more than the estimate.

Sandy Pumphrey, the city's building facilities capital project manager, said he and the project's design team are researching why the bids came in significantly higher than anticipated. Chuck Swore, chairman of the council's Infrastructure Committee, said officials may be able to find places to reduce costs without rejecting the bids, redesigning the project and seeking new submissions.

“From a scheduling standpoint, there would be no benefit to that at all,” he said.

The city's goal is to have the ramp in place by the time the hotel and Convention Complex open in 2013.

Swore said he would like the city to include the full build-out of retail space on the first floor of the First Avenue side of the ramp, which would cost $665,000 in the Knutson bid. Swore said the retail spaces would attract hotel and Convention Complex patrons and generate revenue for those city-owned facilities.

However, council colleague Scott Olson has questioned whether the city should be competing with privately owned first-floor space elsewhere in the downtown.

The city also is in the design phase of a second parking ramp to be built in the 600 block of Second Street SE, in the vicinity of the new federal courthouse. It's expected to open by the summer or fall of 2013 with 595 parking spaces on six floors.