WASILLA -- The city council approved a plan to change the construction strategy for the $14.7 million sports arena project last week, effectively hiring Anchorage-based architecture firm Kumin Associates Inc. to stay with the project and see it through to completion. The new contract is worth an additional $456,000 to Kumin. The city had hired Kumin last spring for the initial design phase of the project with a contract award of $436,500.

Since July, the council has been back and forth on this question and the administration of Mayor Sarah Palin supported the proposal in July, but asked the council to put it off in August. At the meeting last Monday, the contract was introduced as a part of the council's consent agenda and passed with no debate or discussion.

The contract was introduced this time by council member Noel Lowe, who had previously been skeptical of the plan. Lowe said Wednesday that he has since done further research. "This was a complicated issue. It was hard to get my arms around," Lowe said Wednesday.

The reason for the prolonged fussing is that the second Kumin contract wasn't part of the original construction strategy. It was brought forward by Kumin and the Palin administration's project manager Don Moore.

The project is being managed using a design/build strategy, which allows construction to start before the final architectural drawings are finished. Under the city's original strategy, Kumin's job would have concluded with the plans for the building about 40 percent finished. From there, a general contractor would be hired, and the contractor would hire its own architectural firm to complete the rest of the design.

In July, Moore presented the council with a plan called "team build" in which Kumin would double its money but stay on to complete the design during construction. Moore said the team build strategy would eliminate one architectural firm and allow the $14.7 million to be spent more efficiently. It also creates a job management arrangement in which the architecture firm and the contractor are shoulder-to-shoulder and both answer to the owner. The city's initial plan would have had the second architecture firm responsible to the contractor.

Originally, Lowe questioned whether that was fair to other potential architectural contractors to switch the city's strategy. Lowe also wanted specific information about how the change could make the project better.

"I didn't have enough information to decide one way or the other on the [team build] proposal," Lowe said.

During the last eight weeks, Moore has given one additional presentation to the council and Lowe has met with Moore. Lowe also spoke with contractors and owners from a list of previous team build jobs that Kumin designed. Kumin's list includes five jobs, four owners [both public and private] and five different general contractors. Lowe said he contacted all of them.

"They all thought we should change from the initial plan, and half of them recommended we went ahead with the way Kumin proposed. The other half had their own little tweaks and variations [of design/

build]," Lowe said. "But having two architecture firms working on the same project was what everybody objected to."

Palin said this week that she hadn't lobbied the council to vote for the team build plan and that she would have supported either strategy once the council made a decision.

"There was no heartburn on the administration's part. We are going to do this one way or the other," Palin said, adding that the administration continued its work on the project all along.

"To the residents and taxpayers of Wasilla, the product is more important than the process. That's what I've tried to emphasize to the council. They don't care about the hair-splitting and the process as long as it's

legal and ethical," Palin said.

Moore said this week that Kumin's initial plans were far enough along that a request for proposals (RFP) to contractors could be advertised in the first week of

October.