During its RDA meeting Tuesday, the council voted unanimously to adopt a new developer selection policy.

Janene Eller-Smith, executive director of the Ogden City Council, told the Standard-Examiner that the policy is limited in where it can be used.

“The selection policy was developed to apply to RDA-owned property that’s going to be developed in conjunction with the RDA,” she said. “We identified three different procedures that can be used to select a developer. The reason there’s three is to provide a bit of flexibility for the executive director — who is the mayor — who would be doing this selection process.”

Eller-Smith said that, before getting into procedures, developers would be entered into a database.

“This would be a requirement that developers be proactive in getting their name on this list,” she said. “They’ll be asked to identify some information — approximate size of their company, who the principles are in the company, how many employees they have, what their expertise is (housing, commercial, etc.), what their general financial capabilities would be — and anything else the mayor or his staff feel like they need that they could ask for in that database.”

Eller-Smith said it will be up to the mayoral administration to set up the database and establish the final parameters.

Public solicitation

The first of the new selection processes is public solicitation.

Using this method, Eller-Smith said, the RDA would submit a request for qualifications, also called an RFQ, or a request for proposals, known as an RFP, and await contact from interested builders.

“They give them some scope of work and developers can respond to that scope of work. It requires some public noticing,” she said, adding that the process is similar to the city’s policy for selecting developers on other projects.

“Just like on the city side, the executive director can waive the public solicitation process if it’s deemed another method is going to be more proactive or give a better result for the city,” she said.

According to Eller-Smith, the council will also be hearing details sooner on a project with the new policy.

“Once a developer is selected, the board will be notified of that selection,” she said. “That hasn’t been happening. Sometimes it’s a few years down the road after they’ve worked through the process, developed the scope of the project and identified what incentives might be required before they come to the board. This way, if the board has any concerns, they can be addressed up front.”

Direct negotiation

The second option is direct negotiation.

“The administrative staff will just contact, directly, a particular developer and say, ‘We would like you to be involved in this project. Are you willing to do it?'” Eller-Smith said. “They can also pull from that database that they’ve created if they want to interview several developers before they enter into that direct negotiation. Again, the executive director has to give justification for using this method.”

Unsolicited proposal

Finally, Eller-Smith said the RDA could be directly approached by a developer to move forward on a project.

“Out of the blue, a developer comes in and says, ‘Hey, I noticed the RDA owns this particular property, we have some ideas for this. Let us present them to you and see what you think,'” she said. “They can make this proposal to the administration. If the administration is interested, there may be some negotiations about what happens. … Then they could enter into that exclusive negotiation agreement which would then be provided to the board.”

Origins and potential benefit

Eller-Smith said the new policy is about building up transparency on the process of selecting developers for RDA property.

“The council memebrs hear things in the community,” she said. “They just felt like it was important to have something in writing so that it was a little more transparent and it’s clear how the the developers get selected.”

She added that the policy is the product of lengthy discussions with the city attorney’s office and administrative staff.

“The goal is to make sure the city is promoting competition but also getting the best deal for the city,” she said. “That may not necessarily be financial in nature — the best deal might be identified as getting the right development in a particular area.”