City seeking a consultant for largest art buy in Ottawa's history
Jon Willing, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: October 18, 2017 | Last Updated: October 18, 2017 5:48 PM EDT
City hall needs a consultant to manage the largest-ever art buy for Ottawa and it’s willing to pay nearly $200,000 for the outsourced services.
The city is poised to spend $11 million on original art for the Stage 2 rail expansion of the Confederation Line LRT and the Trillium Line.
There’s so much work coordinating the art program for Stage 2 that the city needs an outside advisor to help manage that part of the transit expansion project scheduled to be done in 2023.
The city, which expects to pay $188,991 over six years for the consultant’s work, published a request for proposals earlier this week.
Spending money on a hired hand to quarterback an art program paints a bad picture for residents who are advocating for more community services, according to one councillor.
“When they see $188,000 being spent for a consultant, it’s hard for people to wrap their head around that,” Coun. Riley Brockington said.
Brockington said he accepts that acquiring art is a unique procurement initiative for the city, but it’s “a bitter pill to swallow” when residents are calling for more transit service, for example, when there are scarce tax dollars.
But Nicole Zuger, the city’s program manager of arts and heritage development, said the Stage 2 art program needs outside help to manage more than 17 art projects.
“This is beyond the capacity for the City of Ottawa public art program,” Zuger said in an email.
The Stage 2 transit blueprint calls for 40 kilometres of new rail and 23 new stations to be built after Stage 1 of the Confederation Line opens in 2018.
Stage 2 will stretch train tracks to Algonquin College and Moodie Drive in the west, Trim Road in the east and Earl Armstrong Road in the south, with a spur line to the Ottawa International Airport.
The consultant for the Stage 2 art program is expected to begin by the end of 2017 and the work will continue right through to the opening in 2023.
According to Zuger, the consultant will work with city staff to lead the first phase of the art procurement process, which includes pre-qualification, shortlists and juried selection.
The art consultant will also be in charge of organizing a “materials and methods” symposium, Zuger said.
“This symposium will provide artists with an opportunity to learn from public art professionals, fabricators and established public artists in the application of evolving their current art practice into permanent public art projects,” Zuger said.
A municipal policy compels the city to dedicate one per cent of its funding of major projects to public art. The city is paying $1 billion for its share of the $3.6-billion Stage 2 project. The federal and provincial governments are splitting the rest of the cost.
The city will dedicate $10 million to commissioning art for the two rail lines.
The city is throwing in another $1 million for art specifically in the corridor of Richmond Road and the Byron Avenue linear park, since that stretch will undergo significant transformation during and after the cut-and-cover construction of a train tunnel.
The Stage 1 artwork, which will cost $7.3 million, will be spread across the 13 stations currently under construction.
The city didn’t hire an art consultant for Stage 1, but rail director Steve Cripps said a “technical advisor” was retained to support a number of components of the LRT project, including the public art. The technical advisor fees related to the art component were about $8,000, he said.
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). I do sometimes wonder how many people are like him.. you do notice in Ottawa there seems to be lots of people regularly walking up to Transitway stations from quite far away.
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