City Council - workshop

All right, welcome to the City Council special meeting for Tuesday, July 21st, 2026. We have three items on the agenda. First one is consideration of approval, acceptance, rejection, amendment, and or postponement of awarding bid 2627-04 and contract K-2627-04. 10, buy between the Norman Utilities Authority and TMI Coatings LLC in the amount of $532,200 performance bond, statutory bond, and maintenance bond for the Lindsay Tower resurfacing two logos and budget transfer as outlined in the staff report located in Ward 7. And Chris

Council so the last time I left you was Tuesday, and I had received zero bids that day I thought and so we were going to go post the bids again because I've started 21 day state bidding cycle the next day and But that next morning, our purchasing person came into my office and said, I am very sorry. I got bad news for you, but I found one of the bids in our office that was sitting there in my inbox, on my mailbox, and I overlooked it. But she said, we have it. I was like, well, that's great news. That's not terrible news. I said, let's open it. And so it was TMI Coatings. They painted the Robinson Tower back in the early 2000s with me way back, our good, notable company out of Minnesota. And the bid came in. We'll show you the slides, but it came in under the engineer's estimate. And so we're here to say this little light, your chance of maybe still pulling this off without having to wait 21 more days. So I wanted to show you kind of what we see on the bids, some of our calculations. If we do get this... third party to come in and want to put something on the tank and give us some of that money back, it looks like a good way to put this tank on hold and still keep it in good shape. So I think we can pull it off. It would be going fast, but Ken and I were out there just about an hour ago looking power lines and figuring out how we're going to pull it off. Anyway, we'll start with the presentation.

We populated the kind of our time value money and of our options we had in front of us.

So let's go to the next slide. So how we bid it was, what if you painted white and put two Norman logos on there? That's the $512,000 that they proposed. What if you put the fancy logos on there? This other group, the third party, and they said $532,200. and then to demo they don't demo tanks so we did not get a demo bid so i don't have that this is still the engineer's estimate for a demo but then over here on the left we went on and calculated what if we don't put the city of norman logo on there what would be the cheapest we could get out of this just making it white like we had talked about when we left last time that's 477 700. But again, I think our proposal or what we recommend as staff is to go on and move forward with awarding the bid and have them on deck to start painting. And then we can adjust if this other contract comes in. We can see how that fits into this play. Or we can not do it, not even put City of Norman logos, and we would be in for $477,700, the lowest cost. But if they did pay us back some of the money, That would make the net only $102,998 that we would be in the hole after time. But we took out the lighting package because, I don't know, Jason, we figured we'd bid that at a later date, right? Yeah, I think we have that out on the street now. So I think we need about three weeks to find out what the cost of lighting is. Take any questions or any comments? It's kind of a wild, it's not usually how we do. We usually take our time and bid them.

So I, I'm a professional acquisition guy.

Yeah.

So I noticed your estimate, your independent government estimate that was done by your contractor was pretty dang high. Consultant. Yes. It's pretty dang high compared to what was bid. Yes. So in my mind, you know, just from my experience, the question has to be asked. Does your contractor understand the requirement or do we not understand the requirement? You're a consultant.

I would say the consultant was being safe, and he was worrying. If you look at what he bid high, he thought the legs were going to be very high-priced, and the contractor went low on that. He thought overcoating the bowl was going to be really high, and they went pretty low on that or affordable. The contractor is the one. These guys know it really well. They know it better than the consultants out there. compiling information from different contractors, making a guess. Well, I understand, but a 50% overestimated. I'm opposed. No, I know. My world's like, what? My former world. And let me say another thing. He was worried because we, remember, we smorgasborded it. In his opinion, he didn't like that. He thought that we were really messing that up, the consultant. And he thought by not doing a lump sum, he thought we were not going to get nice bids. And he was right to the point we didn't get many bids because some of the people backed out. But this group jumped on it.

The other question I have is 100-year-old, 100-plus, I guess. So last time we were in here, you mentioned about the legs. And so, has there been any analysis related to the life of the water tire associated with those legs? Does that make sense?

Yeah. Strength and integrity. Yeah. The same company did an assessment of the tank. And we were worried, is the ladder safe to climb on? Is there anything too rusty or about to, you know... need repair, structural repair. And he gave us a report saying, no, it's all in good shape. He would climb it, feels very safe with it. I have that. We have that in our office.

I'm not, I'm not in your guys' world. The last question I have is the, if, if a tank for mine, I understand my past. If you don't have that protection related, you know, cathode, some type of metal, Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. Cathodic protection.

This one doesn't have it, and you see it does rust more. You always weigh the expense of that. Adding cathodic protection is more expensive, so we haven't used it in some of our tanks. We thought about it on a large pipeline we laid. We were thinking about using it. Actually didn't use it on that either, but it's always on the cusp of do you spend that extra money to try to save it, or do you just roll with it?

So one more last question. So we're talking about this for potential use in the future. Given the age and the condition of those legs, we'll have less capacity as far as weight 10 years from now than when it was originally designed.

Does that make sense?

I assume it would.

Just that they have deteriorated over time.

Yeah, your engineer should be saying, okay, it was original, it was manufactured, I handled this, sign up for this. However, given the condition of the tank, what we're going to do to it, this is the future limit of that tank.

Right.

Not on top of water or whatever we're going to put in.

Right.

Okay, that was, I mean, good points.

I mean, right now, it's still deemed safe to use, functional. We kind of came to you guys first. We wanted to demo it. So, I mean, we kind of 180'd, and now people are saying, well, save it. Let's keep it for a little longer. So this is an option to keep it longer and still salvage some of our money. I see here $400,000 for demo work.

Am I confident in that? Because it's basically from your engineer, your guy you hired to do this. Well, his other estimate was 50% off.

Well, it was $320,000. We did buy it two years ago.

So I got bids.

So we just figured the price going up. That's a pretty good number. And actually, he did cost estimate around the $400,000 or $500,000 range before when he did the bidding at private and not going through the city. So that was, he was around these numbers before he went to this bid, like we parted it all up. And he didn't like that and thought it was going to get to high numbers. Sounds good. I will accomplish that.

Thank you.

Yes. I'm cool with this bid. I like the idea of just going ahead and doing our logos with it. I was reading the staff report and recommendations. make sense to do the lighting as another bit. I'm saying since we're doing the lion's share of all this, why not put the logos on there? And if they're going to do it for that price, great.

And you're talking the logos. So we did a third party. City of Norman. Oh, City of Norman. Okay, yeah, we can go forward with that base. But we will be bringing another contract next Tuesday that will be that other option of the more expensive one.

But they're paying for it?

They're paying for it, yeah.

I mean, I guess we could see what they have, but is it going to be what we're putting into this?

Well, that's right there, the $75,000. It's based off of that. They were going to put in $75,000 the first year. They didn't change the numbers, did they? No. So $75,000 the first year and then $50,000 the year to the last year, and then they give you $25,000. It's basically going to pay all but $102,000. Okay.

Well, we'll see what they bring next. We'll bring it forward.

But that's good to know. So base, you don't want to go back to just white. The worst you want to do is just put City of Norman on there. White tank with City of Norman as our lowest effort.

Yes.

Welcome to Norman.

Yeah, welcome to Norman. But yeah.

Okay. Council Member Steele.

Yeah, so regardless of what paint job you go with, if the bid is approved, how long is the paint expected to last and will it need like touch-ups down the line that'll cost money, things like that?

That's a good question. Really, the latest way to do it is to get a 20-year life, 15 to 20. You sandblast it down to white metal and start with the primer and then come back with the paint. That one I know is the state of the art and what we do in all of our other tanks. This one, they're doing it with a power washing. But they have some tenemic paint that they guarantee. They said 10 to 15. We wrote in the memo 10. We're just going to be conservative and say we think we can get 10 years to cover this contract out of.

So if something were to happen and the paint job starts to go after, let's just say five years, would this bid cover them coming back and essentially touching up? No, no. That would be additional money if you have to do something else.

But this paint was last painted in 1994.

I can't remember the date.

So this is what it would look like if it's 30 years old. I mean, with rust and it looks pretty bad. That's 30 years with not painting it.

There's a one-year one.

So usually, typically, around one year, you go and check and look. And if you see little problems, you can fix them now. And ideally, that kind of saves you from having bigger problems down the road.

The Robinson Tire that TMI painted was on, it's right there at the railroad tracks in Robinson. um that paint lasted we did in 2002 to 2004 somewhere in there it lasted well into the teens 20 years yeah and they came by it looked good to me but the tank professionals came by and said well it's starting to chalk it's not as shiny as a fresh coat i'm like looks way better than lindsey so i mean It's kind of an opinion too when it's worn out on the paint and stuff.

I guess all that being said, I'm okay with at least starting with the white and then we could wait to see the contract before we decide to go with logo versus whatever the contract says. I don't know if this is possible or might drop the money, but is there a way you could kind of have the best of both worlds where maybe they get half of it and you could still do the Steve Norman on the other half or no? No.

That's what originally I wanted to propose with OU is have one on one side and OU on the other side. Didn't work out. Fair enough. But, yeah. I think if it has this logo on it, I think they want it to look like the one with the whole thing.

The contract says two of their logos. Yeah, one dollar.

On Google Street View, if you look at the water tower and you go back a couple years, it looks like around 2015 is when you can start seeing the rust. Okay. And then it starts accelerating after that. So 1991, I mean, that's 25 years almost. Hopefully the paint technology has improved a little bit since 1991. Yeah, a lot of things that don't seem to be. Uh, customer first and then Gatsby.

I would assume you do options on the logo, right? Whether you put on it or where you put something else on, you put two options on your basic contract and you decide what you're gonna do later for them. Just get them started with the basic and their size options later.

Yeah, that's what's contemplated here. And then if you all approve the agreement next week. we'll move forward with that design. We've got the design and it'll be attached to that contract so you can see what it looks like.

And everybody will know. Councillor Gansberry?

One, I'd just like, just because it's an open meeting and everything, people listening, where does any of this money, whatever's decided, come from? So it comes from the water, and that's the only place that any of the money comes from, correct? Yes. It's from there. And then, secondly, when... Did a thing at Chickasha and, you know, the dumbest thing that I think they have in their town is that damn Bigfoot thing. But they can show statistically by data that 1.3 million people a year come and take a picture with that dadgum thing. unique visitors to Chickasha that may or may not have stopped by there. And if there's a way that, you know, next Tuesday we do agree on a possible partnership with somebody else to go in on this, and it even gets one chance to be that, what that leg is to them, it could easily make back this $130,000 in revenue just off of tourism around it and everything for us, I believe.

And on that note, would the REVENUE FROM THAT AGREEMENT GO TO THE NORMAN UTILITIES? YES.

AND TO COUNCILMEMBER GANDISBURY'S POINT, ONE OF THE TOOLS AT OUR DISPOSAL IS OPERATED BY SARAH KAPLAN AND HER ABILITY TO DRAW A CIRCLE ON A MAP, AND SHE CAN DRAW A CIRCLE TODAY AND SAY HOW MANY PEOPLE WERE IN THE CIRCLE LAST YEAR. SO IT'S REALLY A POWERFUL TOOL. but it'll give us an idea about how many people showed up and actually spent 10 minutes. 20 minutes, half hour, in a pretty small circle around that tower. And of course, we recognize probably nobody's spending any time there at all right now. But I think it's a thing where we can actually gather that data and provide counsel. And that concept of placemaking, they figured it out. And that leg lamp was a big buzz for a long time.

It still is.

They made a whole documentary on it.

Did you talk about the high school? Was there a statue of Mia?

Yeah, just kind of following up with the money question. So, like, the bids are up there, but in the packet it said you're requesting around $575,000. Is that extra, just like a buffer, like just in case?

Yeah, we just requested $300,000 over the amount we already had in that account, just to have extra.

And so whatever's not used just goes back into the utilities fund? Goes into the water fund.

Any other questions, comments?

for other agreement come forward as well okay is it it is on your agenda to take action on the contract with the painting contractor tonight so we are agendized as a special meeting so you can actually approve it I'd like to

acceptance, rejection, amendment, and or postponement of awarding bid 2627-04 and contract K-2627-10 by and between the Norman Utilities Authority and TMI Coatings LLC and in the amount of $532,200 performance bond, statutory bond, and maintenance bond, so the Lindsay Tower resurfacing two logos and budget transfer is outlined in the staff report. I will entertain a motion to accept or reject the bid and approve or reject contract K-2627-10 and accompanying bonds.

Motion to approve.

Second. And we recognize staff for discussion already. We have council comments. The motion on the floor is to accept the bid and approve the contract. Those in favor, say aye.

Aye. And those opposed?

The motion to accept or reject the bid and approve passes. of temporary construction easements E2627-1 through E2627-4 for the Summit Hollow Drainage Improvement Project as outlined in the staff report. And I'll entertain a motion to accept or reject the easements for the Summit Hollow Drainage Improvement and recognize staff, Scott Sturtz, for discussion.

Scott Sturtz, Director of Public Works. I'll be real short and brief with this one, kind of give you the brief history. Basically, this used to be, this is down in the Summit Lakes addition. It's four houses that there used to be a concrete channel that ran behind their house, and over time, that channel became weakened and it collapsed. The stormwater crews went in and put a pipe in, and it had problems, and it floated up out of the ground. So we went out there and replaced it, and it floated out of the ground again. So this is wanting to go in there and actually fix the problem once and for all so these citizens' homes are taken care of, their backyards aren't disrupted. We've actually gone out, we have professional engineering plans. We want to go out to bid on this project. And as part of that, we'll be putting in a concrete box. It will not float, we know that. And then we'll be coming back in and restoring your yards to their current condition, putting in some drains back there, doing some items at the north end to help some of the water get into this box instead of around a retaining wall from when the Siena Springs Section 2 was constructed. That's kind of been a concern too. So as part of that, we need a little bit more room to work because we're also going to do some grading to make sure that we can get the water out of their backyards because there's some low spots. And we've been working on these. And I got to say thank you to Councilman McGandis-Berry, who went out there and sealed the deal on the final one that we need to get this moving forward. These are temporary construction easements, meaning that they are not filed at the courthouse. This is just an agreement between us and the property owners. And once the project is done, these are terminated. They're no longer in effect. So that's really all we're asking for tonight is your acceptance of these four easements so we can go out and help fix some people's problem that we may be part of the problem. So just asking for your help on this one, really.

And with your consideration and approval, basically you're authorizing the mayor to sign those temporary agreements. They're signed by the property owners. They're notarized. BASED ON COUNCIL'S ACTION TONIGHT, THE MAYOR WOULD SIGN AND WE WOULD GIVE THOSE HOMEOWNERS BACK THEIR FULLY EXECUTED COPY OF THAT TEMPORARY EASEMENT.

I WAS JUST EXPLAINING TO SOMEONE THE OTHER DAY HOW I DON'T HAVE ANY EXECUTIVE THOR POWERS AND IT TAKES THE WHOLE COUNCIL. THEY WANTED ME TO LOOK AT SOME AGREEMENT AND SIGN IT TODAY. Council Member Steele.

So all the owners have already agreed to the easement?

Yes, they've already signed and they've been notarized. So we've got signed and notarized. So we know it's actually their signatures and very confident they all understand the work that's going to be done.

Council Member Grant.

I'm cool with this. And thank you, Council Member Gibbensberry, for getting that guy to agree and going above and beyond. We appreciate it.

That's exactly what, yeah, above and beyond, but that's what we have to do. Unlikely you'll find Congress people doing stuff like that.

Relationship driven. Council Member Bruce.

So is this an HOA? It looked like it was in a neighborhood.

It is in a neighborhood and there is an HOA, but this was a public infrastructure and a public easement that was installed. So the builder didn't do it. There was an existing structure on this one.

It's kind of a, it's a really weird situation. Correct. So, I mean, I've got places all over World 3 that, you know, that are in sad shape. These easements, I guess the consideration is a dollar. Don't fix my stuff for a buck.

The day the pipe floated, we got four inches of rain in about two hours. Property owner sent in a picture of their backyard with this large black pipe along the fence. And I ran over to Scott's office and I said, please tell me this isn't ours. Nope. That one's ours. That was tough to hear. Recognizing that if, a big old piece of city infrastructure just ripped up through your backyard, you would not be happy about it. I wouldn't be happy about that. We totally understand. Obviously, we didn't have... The budget, nobody anticipated that happening, but the whole team pulled together, came up with how are we going to cover the cost. It's not optional. We absolutely had to restore those folks' backyards, and we have a high degree of confidence the project going in will be a permanent solution. Those homeowners are going to have to think about it again.

So you look at Inhofe Creek and what's going on there, what's going on in the past and how the city came. I've got the same things going on on Boggy Creek.

I'd just like to say once again, because I know that there might be people listening right now to this meeting, is I just want to thank the two neighbors that know who they are, that worked very hard in finding a way to work with me, trust the process, and that it's very much appreciated on their ends to make this happen for the neighborhood.

Very good. Any other questions for staff? Okay. Okay. And the motion on the floor is to accept easements E-2627-1 through E-2627-4. Those in favor, say aye. Aye. Those opposed? Seeing none. All right. Passes 9-0.

And we will be going out to bed on this project now with this item resolved. We'll be going out to bed on this this week and be starting as quickly as possible. Thank you.

All right. Item number three is consideration of adjourning into an executive session as authorized by Oklahoma Statutes, Title 25, to discuss possible litigation regarding the acquisition of right-of-way in connection with the Lindsay Street Special Corridor Projects and convene into an executive session in order to discuss possible litigation regarding the acquisition of right-of-way in connection with the Lindsay Street Special Corridor Project from Pickard to Elm Avenue.

Motion to adjourn.

Submission.