The Kenai City Council passed a resolution awarding an agreement for the Kenai Waterfront Redevelopment Assessment and Feasibility Study. Request for proposals were issued in September. The proposal submitted by McKinley Research Group, LLC was awarded the highest points and determined to be the most advantageous to the city.
The resolution was initially on the agenda for the November 3rd meeting, but it was postponed due to some of the newly elected city council members with a motion to enact on the floor. The concern some councilmembers had related to the scope of the study, private property and government overreach.
Council Member, Henry Knackstedt:
“When we discussed this, we had two new councilmembers on and they stated that they had not had an opportunity to meet with Mr. Ostrander and didn’t have the information necessary to be able to make an informed decision. It sounded like the timing was such that it was okay to postpone for awhile to get to that point. I thought it was appropriate to do so even though it wasn’t pertinent to really the discussion that we had in front of us. We’re back to that now and, really, what we’re here to do is award a contract to McKinley Research Group. It’s really not a discussion of appropriation, we’ve already done that and determined that the project is moving forward. It was just, what we’re doing now is simply the resolution for the contract. Evaluation would be was there an appropriate advertisement and review done to determine whether or not McKinley Research Group is the highest score or not. Based on that information, there’s no reason to not approve this contract moving forward.”
City Manager, Paul Ostrander:
“Obviously there’s a process that went in front of the RFP process where there was a work session and then an appropriating ordinance that authorized me to issue an RFP with a budget of $95,000. We issued the RFP. It advertised for three weeks. We extended it for a week. We did receive three proposals. We had a group of three that utilized a matrix to determine which of those three proposals were in the best interest of the city and could be awarded with the budgetary constraints that we had. Once we were done with that, McKinley was the clear leader of the three that did submit and that’s why you have the resolution in front of you tonight.”
Resolution No. 2021-64 passed the Kenai City Council.
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