Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves said the bids for the “Reimagine Palafox Street” project are over budget in “the stratosphere” and the city will have to figure out what to do next.
After the mayor spoke at his weekly press conference, it appears the bid totals were posted to the city’s website, indicating the city will need to come up with at least $240,000 to move the project forward.
Before the numbers were posted on the city’s website, Reeves said at his weekly press conference, that the city was still reviewing which bid to go with.
“So anything already on social media that we’ve picked anything is not only not true, but certainly we have things that we have to do first,” Reeves said at the Oct. 14 press conference. “For example, the engineer of record needs to look at the bids and those types of thing.”
At the press conference, Reeves said he’s limited by city procurement rules on what he can disclose because a winning bidder hadn’t been selected, but there would be a better idea of what those numbers would be by next week.
However, following Reeves’ press conference, the city appears to have prematurely posted a notice of intent to award the contract on its website for a base bid of $7.7 million to Site & Utility LLC.
If that bid holds true, Reeves will have to find at least $240,000 in funds and get the City Council to approve those funds before the project moves forward.
According to the documents that were posted on the city’s website, the price also doesn’t include any work at the intersection of Garden and Palafox streets or installation of security bollards, which would add at least another $3.6 million to the project.
What is the “Reimagine Palafox” project?
The “Reimagine Palafox Street” project will cover Palafox Street from Garden Street to Main Street with wider sidewalks, crosswalks, brick pavers and better drainage. The large-scale project will require essentially rebuilding the road from the dirt up, and the street will have to be completely closed.
The project has seen both enthusiasm and pushback from downtown business owners unhappy about the loss of some parking on Palafox Street and the need to close the street to traffic for several months.
The origins of the project came after Florida Power and Light tore up many areas of Palafox Street to modernize the downtown electric grid underground. The power company paid the city $3 million to fund repairs to the iconic street, and Reeves proposed using those funds as the seed money to dramatically upgrade the street for pedestrians.
When Reeves first proposed the idea, the city hoped the project would be $5 million, but as the design progressed, the budget was increased to $9 million. Besides the funding from FPL, the rest of the project will be paid for with funds from the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency and the city’s parking revenue.
When will it begin?
If the funding can be found, it appears the project will happen all at once rather than in one-block increments, as some business owners wanted to see done. The bids for doing the project in one block increments ranged between an additional $690,000 to an additional $9 million.
The project description provides a 10% incentive bonus to complete the work on Palafox Street itself by May 2026. After that, if the builder completes the work by June 13, 2026, they get a 5% bonus. If it goes beyond that, there is no bonus, but the contract requires the work on Palafox Street to be done by July 3, 2026.
If the requirements for the bonuses aren’t met, then the cost of the project would fall back below the city’s current $9 million budget.
Other work on side streets off Palafox Street could continue until November 2026, while Palafox itself would be reopened.
Reeves said the city will have to move quickly to ensure the work gets underway in January and causes the least disruption to downtown businesses as possible.
“The goal of starting as close to January as possible is absolutely focused on our small business owners downtown and saying, let’s try to pick the months of the year that are the least impactful to you,” Reeves said. “And so we’re still committed to that, and at this point, again, we’ve got lots more to go, but at this point, our intent is to start the first week of January.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: ‘Reimagine Palafox’ bids go over $9 million budget but Mayor D.C. Reeves still committed
Reporting by Jim Little, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
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