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DPBA Takes A Closer Look:
The County's First Public Meeting On Revitalization P3
On Thursday evening, March 31st, about 60 people attended The County's very first public meeting on the Dana Point Harbor Revitalization Project's plan for a Dana Point Harbor Public-Private-Partnership (P3). As many already know, the RFQ was published by the County on March 16th. Click here to read. (Note that The County as revised these RFQ documents since originally published.)
The specific topic of the meeting was the Request-For-Qualifications (RFQ) that in turn will precede a Request For Proposals (PFP) to be solicited from selected qualifiers. Completion of the RFP process will yield one or two bid finalists, and ultimately a P3 contract to build and operate our harbor for the next 50 years.
The meeting only lasted about one hour. It's most major purpose was to kick off the actual RFQ acquisition-evaluation-selection process. OC Dana Point Harbor Director Brad Gross made a short but informative presentation and accepted written questions from attendees. Click here to see the presentation slide deck, which was closely followed in person. There's a lot of useful information in one place here, as well as the painful to see project time line since 2002 (but not from back to 1998 on when the Revitalization Project unofficially started).
During the presentation, behind the scenes, attendee questions were being classified into three groups: - Questions that could be answered on the spot concerning the content of the RFQ itself as well the evaluation process.
- Questions that could not be answered due to laws and policy governing the RFQ process.
- Questions requiring research before answering.
Jon Conk of Project Dimensions, a principle RFQ drafter, was present as a subject matter expert. All questions in the first group were answered. By requiring questions be submitted in writing, with contact info included, the County had the info needed to log and follow up as appropriate.
You can also click here to read a short OC Register article covering the meeting. We should add that we too are concerned that the existing character of the harbor that Jody and Ray Payne (quoted late in the article) love so much and want to see protected. We too hope our harbor, park and community center remains as highly desirable, fully accessible, and just as affordable as it is today for kids, seniors, families, boaters, walkers, pets and the rest of our harbor community. DPBA will of course continue to represent all these stakeholders, and especially recreational boaters.
As for the local resident quoted at the beginning of the article who apparently wants a foreigner (his term) to be hired as builder / operator of a "plum project", it sounded to us like he meant "bigger" and "fancier". Therefore also potentially "overbuilt" for the above stated purposes... purposes that are being so well fulfilled today, notwithstanding a well understood need for more parking, in addition to renewal on both land and water resources. Our specific fear here is that were our harbor to be overbuilt for its stated purpose, our harbor would could almost inevitably incur much higher debt than otherwise, along with necessary developer profit on top of that, as the developer would bear the entire risk and fiduciary responsibility for the repayment of that additional debt. Of course it's the actual harbor users, all those people listed earlier (not nearby residents interested in property values) who must come up with the money to repay that debt and create that developer profit. Remember, different from County schools, other parks and publicly owned recreational areas, there'll be zero financial help coming our way. That's regardless of the higher taxes expected to be coming from the harbor following rebuild. So then, here "overbuilt" means real jeopardy that the Harbor's stated purposes would be no longer be achievable. Need we also add that "overbuilt" was the precise situation that The County uncovered during the recently completed value engineering assessment of the landside reconstruction plan? That assessment reduced the estimated cost of publicly financed landside reconstruction from about 200 million dollars to less than 100 million dollars, simply by more closely aligning project scope with purpose.
Regardless of what that local resident actually meant to say though, the good news here is that Lisa Bartlett, a 25-year Dana Point resident and our 5th District OC Supervisor, has recently gone on record saying that The County fully intends to retain and protect the existing small-town character of our harbor. Plus, our careful read of the thousands of pages of the RFQ language is that the developer qualifying criteria can be supportive this goal.
For the Board of Directors, the Dana Point Boaters Association, Rodger Beard President
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