Remarks by Lance Hines
22 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 1 of 1
“Director Hines. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for all your comments. Again, to reiterate, as Jay said and Director Lewis said, I know I can speak for everybody up here, but I know I haven't signed an NDA, so... There we go. And then to point out a clear error in somebody's comment earlier is that I do not own an interest in any construction companies. I have a customer that builds racks for these data centers. Whether or not they will get a contract to put them into the Little Rock data center, I do not know. But it is a benefit. They're looking at putting operations here to build those for…”
“Again, we... We've had discussions, we've had votes in this community, and overwhelmingly this community has voted to build this super site to attract these exact same kinds of businesses. And I'll say it again, a hyperscale data center is a medium-intensity industrial use. There are a whole lot more things at the port that are already existing and that could come that use a lot more resources and create a lot more pollution, or potentially. But we have regulations that deal with that. I think if we want to continue to be a pro-growth, progressive city that employs thousands and lifts all…”
“Mayor, make a motion to add M1, M2, M3, M4, and M5 to December 15, and October 20, respectively. I think it's 10. 10. I'm sorry, 10. 2 and 10. Sorry.”
“Thanks. I'll be brief. I appreciate you guys getting this turn around. John and I talked yesterday and he gave me a heads up this was coming, so that's why I don't have a whole lot of questions. I think this is actually we've known this was coming. I think the fact that we've got it well ahead of our budget because it's such a big number within our budget allows us to make some other decisions ahead of time versus waiting until the last minute. So I appreciate you guys' efforts on this. And I know they like to throw us curveballs in the end. But it does look like they've sweetened the pot. I…”
“On Item two, I'd like some information on that from our public works folks.”
“Hey, Manisha, how are you? Let me pull this up. I've got it in front of me. Sorry. So as I went into the resolution, Am I reading this right? So this is a $25 million project. We've got a 20% match. So it's actually 30 million 31.25.”
“So then once we duck these over $4 million in engineering fees, we're roughly got 25.6 million in construction costs, approximately.”
“And I've had this You know, I brought this up before that if I'm doing my math right, that puts the engineering consulting fees at around 17 percent, which to me in any private sector business is way out of line, probably double what they should be. And so I've got some serious questions on why that is as as we've gone in the past, because that's money that could be used to do another intersection, make another safe. And it just I wasn't familiar with some of the engineering firms, and I'm also hearing from other engineering firms in town that our portal is not emailing them when we put bids…”
“NEW SPEAKER AND I GUESS THE OTHER QUESTION IS, IS ANY OF THIS WE CAN DO IN HOUSE AND THEN GET CREDIT TOWARDS OUR 20%? FOR DOING THAT WORK IN HOUSE VERSUS HAVING TO PAY IT OUT.”
“NEW SPEAKER ANY OF IT. BOTH. I KNOW CONSTRUCTION WE NORMALLY DON'T DO BUT WE'VE GOT ENGINEERS ON STAFF.”
“Okay. All right. If you would get me the information on that, I would I would appreciate it. Like I said, this is something I told you guys I'd be looking at and we can't continue to pay out all these fees that that, you know, that or we don't get our cost estimates right. And we end up with we end up engineering to a lower budget. And then I guess the question for Tom is,”
“And I can tell you, and you can share with the procurement team, that the engineering firms that are not getting notifications, because they're going back and checking. Yes. That's why I'm getting calls.”
“Our staff's attitude is, well, you need to contact Bonfire about that. We're the ones pushing everybody to use Bonfire. Are we paying Bonfire for this service?”
“I mean, and these are questions you can get me answers to.”
“But I know that Bonfire is charging our vendors to sign up on the service. So.”
“These are all vendors that are signed up on Bonfire, and I'm telling you the response that three of them got from our staff was you need to contact Bonfire. We don't have anything to do with that. That's what I'm saying. It's not acceptable. We're forcing vendors to use that system. Then we need to get some skin in the game when we're hearing that people aren't getting emails when they should have got notifications because they're on our list of qualified qualified engineers. They've responded to our request for qualifications that I guess we last time we did them was in 2025. They're on that…”
“Willie, thanks. I know we've had some discussions about this offline. So I think the big question in everyone's minds, because this all rolled back to our single-use police fleet, back to last year's budgeting in November and December, what's the date that we get to single-use fleet in police departments?”
“So next year we should achieve signal use okay, and I think the dissonance with a lot of us is that when we had conversations and That we thought we had more and more vehicles coming in and coming in faster And I think that's the frustration on the PD's depart parks With the Reagan file guys I'm talking to, I think we all thought when the mayor committed we'd have the funds that we'd be much further along this year than going into next year. And I appreciate that. How long has this been ready to present to us? Because I thought we were supposed to get it earlier in the year.”
“So, well, I just want to point this out to everybody. This is a lot of information. So if I flip back to the number, next slide, the annual spend by fund. So the real number for us is really the general fund spend. Because waste, street, fleet, and vehicle storage are all enterprise funds, correct? They generate their own revenues to buy their own equipment through trash rates, state turn back funds on fuel, correct? So really that's our concentration as a board going into budgeting time. I can tell you from a board member, and you and I have had this conversation, One of the things, it's…”
“Thank you, Director Hinn. Mayor, I'd like to make a motion. We had a zoning vote on August 2nd meeting the applicant. was not present, and I move to expunge our vote and set a new hearing on that item for September 15th, and I'll rely on Tom to get us the exact numbers and figures for the item.”
“We're going to get some motions to... M1, M2, M3 to the consent agenda, and M4 to the group guidance.”
“Director Hines. Thank you, Mayor. Keep my comments brief since we've been here such a long time. Judge Griffin earlier proposed that this data center is a scale that's not known. And if you want to take the logical conclusion to that, every new industry we've approved in this city was at a scale not known, whether it be Trex, Wellspun, Amazon. But the truth is that the scale is known. They're all over the country. We've seen good examples and bad examples. We have just up the road a good example of how they've operated in prior Oklahoma. My question and my logical conclusion to this, if you…”