The Bend City Council agreed Wednesday to spend an additional $495,000 to finish designing improvements to Galveston Avenue with the hope that private development will pay most of the multi-million dollar construction price tag.

City councilors voted 5-1 to allocate the money so Omaha-based HDR, the engineering firm designing Galveston Avenue, can finish. Mayor pro tem Sally Russell recused herself from the vote because she owns property along Galveston Avenue.

This vote brings the total amount paid to HDR to about $840,000. Construction on the corridor between Tumalo Bridge and 14th Street is expected to cost $3.9 million, but the city has not yet decided from where that money would come.

Bend has already made a significant investment in planning the corridor’s improvements and shouldn’t let that money go to waste, Councilor Barb Campbell said.

“I’m afraid it’s going to get stale and old and we’re going to start again,” she said. “There’s no future where we don’t have to rebuild Galveston. That is coming someday.”

Because Galveston Avenue does see a lot of private development, having a full design for what the street should look like will allow the city to require builders to improve pavement and stormwater systems as they come in, Bend Development Services Director Russ Grayson said.

“We view it as an opportunity where we can make more improvement,” Grayson said.

Councilor Bill Moseley, the sole “no” vote, called the idea of counting on private developers to make piecemeal improvements to the city’s storm sewer system “suspicious and expensive.” He said the council shouldn’t approve spending money on design when it doesn’t have the funds for construction.

Moseley said there’s “a high degree of likelihood” that the planning money will be wasted, something city staff described as “sunk costs.”

Project manager Garrett Sabourin said delaying design was more likely to result in sunk costs, or a waste of the money the council already spent. Without a final design, the city can’t tell private developers everything they should do to help.

“It doesn’t set us up well if we’re looking to leverage this design for private development,” he said.

The design costs would come to about 17 percent of the total project costs, which Sabourin said is more than the city typically tries to spend on design. But the project is more complex than many and city councils have taken a start-and-stop approach to supporting the project, he said.

“Every time that we delay things and we don’t have a continuous project, we lose efficiency,” Sabourin said.

The final design will be a stripped-down version of initial design work, he said. It won’t include additional onstreet parking on Columbia Street and Harmon Boulevard or a mini-roundabout at the intersection of Harmon and Galveston.

The redesigned road also will have shorter stretches of medians than originally proposed. They’d be limited to areas with a lot of pedestrian traffic and not much demand to turn left, Sabourin said.

“The ultimate goal of that minimal median treatment is to reduce or remove any areas where we were restricting left turns into alleys, driveways or streets,” he said.

Galveston resident Nicole Weathers told the council she would rather see the design money spent on smaller changes to the street or on other road projects, such as the city’s match to a potential federal grant to rework the Bend Parkway.

“Galveston is a thriving, vibrant street,” she said. “Let’s use this money to paint crosswalks, add lighting (and) fix the sidewalks.”

Councilor Nathan Boddie said he was interested in using the design money to improve the area’s lighting, crosswalks and storm sewer. Drainage problems in the area cause unmanaged stormwater to run into the river, he said.

Cheaper fixes to some of the issues on Galveston Avenue don’t do enough to meet the needs the road will have as it continues to develop, Mayor Casey Roats said.

“You could do some really cheap, inexpensive things, but it doesn’t get you the corridor improvement that was so important to many of you not so long ago,” Roats said.

Councilor Justin Livingston said he was “awfully torn” on the project but voted for it.

“The question I have is ‘Why is Galveston special?’” he said. “It seems like we’re treating a handful of blocks differently than we’d treat any other three-lane road.”

— Reporter: 541-633-2160; jshumway@bendbulletin.com