City council meets
October 21, 2015
By Temple Ligon
Columbia City Council held an executive session Tuesday afternoon at 4:00 and a regular meeting at 6:00.
Hotel deal
Under “Receipt of legal advice which relates to a matter covered by attorney-client privilege,” the lead item was “Hotel Litigation.” Apparently the lawsuit against the city by architecture firm Stevens & Wilkinson is still in play, still being litigated, which suggests an appeal and another day in court.
S&W won the first round and accordingly was to collect on its invoice plus interest, a few million dollars all told. S&W outsourced the hotel design to TVS of Atlanta. The Hilton that S&W and the city paid TVS to design never got built. The one that did, the one now operating as a four-diamond Hilton at the corner of Senate and Park, cost about $450,000 for the architecture/engineering fee to get it up and running.
In the beginning, before TVS picked up its pencils, S&W signed a memorandum of understanding where the city agreed to pay S&W something just above 7% of the construction cost of $37 mil., or close to $2.6 mil. for S&W’s fee, which turned out to be five times the fee necessary to get the hotel up and running. In the memorandum of understanding the city and S&W signed, all the players agreed no one got paid anything until the city sold the bonds to gain financing for the project. The city never sold the bonds, so there was never any funding for the city-built, city-owned hotel.
Pay raise
Council considered a pay raise for its members, an $1,800 increase over its current annual pay of $13,350. The mayor is paid $75,000 a year, and the pay raise was not for him. Council voted against it, so the pay raise cannot be reconsidered for another two years, or until the November 2017 election cycle. Council last got a raise in 2006, which suggests if only for inflation a raise might be in order.
