Charley Johnson visits with The Flag’s Steve Hallstrom Show
(FARGO, ND) – After more than three months of meeting, a convention center committee continues to work towards developing a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the center.
“We’re working hard on the nitty gritty now of trying to get the things we want in the first phase,” Charley Johnson, President and CEO of Visit Fargo-Moorhead, said. “It’ll be a two-phase process. The first phase of the RFP was minimum requirements, and then we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to score it when it comes back in.”
He said the group made progress in their meeting today to determine how the proposals will be scored.
“Before this week, we had like four quadrants, four categories with line items in them, like location and concept plan, who’s the team going to be,” Johnson said. “And today, actually, we were able to do some moving around, and we discovered there were some redundancies. So now we have three quadrants.”
The group also determined how much weight each of the areas will have in making the decision – site consideration will receive 40 percent of the scoring, with the concept plan and development team work 30 percent each. The next process is to further refine how each of the individual line items under each area will be scored.
It’s the group’s hope to have the RFP prepared for the Fargo City Commission within the next month, with the process then beginning mid-June.
“We’re asking developers to propose a site and a concept plan,” he said.
The concept was created using a public-private partnership. Johnson said the public part is the lodging tax that will be used to build the convention facility, with the private being what’s going to be required of the facility – an attached hotel and other amenities.
“We’re going to say, preferably, a full-service hotel, and then maybe some additional meeting space in that, mixing and matching,” he said. “But I think each one of the proposals we get will be somewhat different, and we want to be a little bit vague in the RFP, so we leave room for creativity from the developers.”
Johnson said a project is hoped to be picked by the end of 2025 or early 2026.
The lodging tax has yet to be started.
“It won’t start until the project is set to go,” Johnson said.
He made the comments on The Flag’s Steve Hallstrom Show.
