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BUSINESS NEWS FENWAY CENTER READY TO START CONSTRUCTION Joint venture partners Gerding Edlen, TH Real Estate, and Meredith Management have signed a long-term ground lease with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation for Phase I of Fenway Center. The $240 million mixed-use property spans 4.5 acres and is located between Brookline, Beacon Street, David Ortiz Way, and the Massachusetts Turnpike. Construction is scheduled to begin immediately. The Architectural Team, Inc. located in Chelsea, Massachusetts, is the architecture firm for Fenway Center and the interior design firm is Planeta Design Group of Boston. The general contractor for Fenway Center is John Moriarty & Associates. Construction for Phase I began in December and is slated to be completed by the beginning of 2020.
The announcement was made by the developer, Fenway Center Development LLC, a partnership of Gerding Edlen and John Rosenthal. Located adjacent to the revitalized Yawkey Station and Fenway Park, Fenway Center, once fully completed, will create 1,800 new construction jobs, 126 new permanent jobs, and more than $2.4 billion in economic impact over 99 years. Additional benefits will include $600 million investment to the area and $5.7 million in property taxes per year during the build out phase. Fifteen percent of the market rate units will be designated affordable with two-thirds of the units being on-site. Phase I will take two years to complete and will comprise two residential apartment buildings with 312 apartments, 37,000-square-feet of ground floor retail and 200 underground
parking spaces. It will also include a 12,000-square-foot air rights deck and landscaped pedestrian walkway over Yawkey Station between Beacon St. and Yawkey Station. Fenway Center is designed to be a model for smart growth, transit and sustainable energy oriented development respecting the urban grid, replacing a large surface parking lot and filling in existing space between long, wind- swept bridges with new buildings and retail amenities along Beacon Street and Brookline Avenue. The buildings are arranged so that the taller buildings are located adjacent to Yawkey Station, serving as an architectural marker and gateway, while the smaller buildings are scaled down in respect to the Audubon Circle neighborhood and Fenway Park area.
Go back to the request for proposals. What information did the client ask for? And in what order? This is what the client wants to see and how the client wants your submittal organized. Then you can go to your boilerplate or previous proposals and pull only the information that was requested. In addition to the clues provided in the RFP regarding content and organization, the RFP may also include the client’s evaluation criteria. There may be items here in addition to the content clues provided earlier in the RFP. Without changing the organization of your submittal, you have to make sure you have addressed these criteria. Remember: Your proposal must be about what the client wants to hear, and not what you want to say. If you do all this and still end up under the page limit, you can add other information you think will help the owner choose your firm or team. You can also deliver fewer than the maximum number of pages. When appointed to a selection committee, the normal daily workload of the client’s staff member doesn’t go away. So they love submittals that are shorter than the limit. And by the way, even if the RFP doesn’t include page limits, font, or margin requirements, most clients still appreciate brevity, especially when dealing with the kinds of projects for which they might receive dozens of proposals. BERNIE SIBEN, CPSM, is owner and principal consultant of The Siben Consult, LLC, an independent A/E marketing and strategic consultancy located in Austin, Texas. He can be reached at 559-901-9596 or at siben@sibenconsult.com. “You can deliver fewer than the maximum number of pages. When appointed to a selection committee, the normal daily workload of the client’s staff member doesn’t go away. So they love submittals that are shorter than the limit.”
BERNIE SIBEN, from page 3
gutting the subject of the article. But it can be done. Proposal limitations are very different. Instead of a maximum number of words, you get a maximum number of pages and, possibly, limitations on font sizes and margins. One problem is that you think much of your current proposal already exists in previous submittals. You have many paragraphs, pages, and tables in your recent proposal and boilerplate files, including both firm and project descriptions, professional resumes, QA/QC processes, and other (to you, at least) interesting information. So you pick and choose, and assemble a first draft, 30 pages of great information not including the project approach. “Go back to the request for proposals. What information did the client ask for? And in what order? This is what the client wants to see and how the client wants your submittal organized.” But the client has imposed a limitation of 25 pages for the submittal. Now you spend hours cutting text, replacing paragraphs with bullet lists, wondering if you can describe the proposed staff in a one- or two-page table, emailing the client’s contact to ask about putting actual resumes in an appendix whose pages aren’t counted. You get down to 22 pages. Then the technical lead gives you a six-page project approach! And you have to start cutting again, without gutting the approach or omitting something critical from the document. There is a better way!
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THE ZWEIG LETTER February 12, 2018, ISSUE 1235
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