The latest news on the Queen Mary reminded me of the fact that I’ve never heard of a contractor coming in on any project under budget, no matter how small.
“I know we told you we could get your rumpus room remodeled for $55,500, but the materials and our labor weren’t as expensive as we had anticipated, so it came to just a little shy of $38,000. To whom shall I make out the refund check?” said no contractor in the history of contracting.
And that’s for a rumpus room. A little carpet, a couple sheets of drywall, 160 nails and a bumper pool table. What do you think would happen if you got an estimate on refurbishing and otherwise shoring up a long-neglected ocean liner from the 1930s that’s been sitting in corrosive saltwater since your grandfather was a wee lad in a sailor suit?
Last week, the L.A.-based Urban Commons, the Queen Mary’s new operators and the latest in a long line of dreamers of over-imagined visions of turning the ship into a major tourist destination, announced that the Queen is now a safe place to visit, thanks, mostly, to a new fire safety system.
Urban Commons joins the city, which owns the ship, in possessing an engagingly naive idea of what it takes to get work done.
As LB Post reporter Kelly Puente pointed out in a piece Sunday that in the ship’s ongoing refurbishment, the city budgeted $200,000 to upgrade the long-ignored fire safety system on the Queen. Two years later, when the system was fixed and the ship declared safer, the cost was $5.29 million.
To put that back into your own home-improvement terms, that’s roughly the same as getting an estimate to renovate your kitchen for $3,000 and ending up with a bill for $80,000. Serves you right for hiring a company that tells you they can rebuild your kitchen for the price of a a couple of new iPhones.
I’m not an expert (well, OK, I am, but I’m a self-deprecating expert) but, when a guy says—like a guy from Urban Commons said, “We’ve definitely had some challenges, but you’re dealing with an 82-year-old ship that’s historical in nature, so you can’t just open up the walls”—I immediately think that that should have been considered when figuring out what to budget for the job.
The overruns are found all over the Queen. A $2.3 million estimate for roofing and deck repairs billowed to $5.97 million; a hull paint job and rust repair was penciled out at $1.7 million and actually ran to $2.8 million; a paltry $250,000 estimate for fixing leaking side tanks ended up costing $475,000.
It almost sounds like someone thought they were repairing a 20-year-old condominium unit instead of a mammoth sea vessel that’s been buffeted by the equally vicious forces of time and the elements for more than eight decades.
I don’t have an overabundance of faith in Urban Commons. I don’t believe the company can turn the Queen Mary into the nation’s playground. I don’t believe it will build an entertainment complex on and around the ship that will bring millions of dollars into the city every year.
I can see that it’s an exciting idea. The sparkling artist conceptions of how the ship will look in five brisk years with nicely dressed couples strolling amid fun and fancy restaurants, rock-climbing gyms and an amphitheater with top-name talent are just as fantastical as a Frank Frazzeta-inspired Dodge van paint job. Not gonna happen in real life. Not without someone first spending half-a-billion dollars just to get the ship safe(r) and the whole splended project off the ground. And that figure, judging by the way things are going so far, is not going to be enough—and then having that whole thing be spectacular enough to lure tens of thousands of people each day in a part of the country where the bar is set awfully high for entertainment.
It’s not like Urban Commons has any ground-breaking ideas. In the 50 years the ship has been docked here, everyone’s taken a shot at making a go of the Queen Mary, from carpet-baggers to home-grown fans: Diners Club, Specialty Restaurants, Jack Wrather, Walt Disney (who, admittedly, only bought the ship to get its hands on the Wrather Corp.-owned Disneyland Hotel) and a half-dozen other former operators.
All received sweet deals from Long Beach with nothing much asked except that the Queen Mary be made profitable enough to at least earn its own keep and maybe toss a few coins at the city to buy a swimming pool or pay for a couple of cops.
It’s been a long list of sad failures, with the Queen Mary’s sole accomplishment being that it’s become the premiere icon for the city of Long Beach.
The question now is, will it ever be an icon for success, or is it destined to finally become a symbol for unrealized promises and dreams that come up short or empty?
Tim Grobaty is a columnist and the Opinions Editor for the Long Beach Post. You can reach him at 562-714-2116, email [email protected], @grobaty on Twitter and Grobaty on Facebook.
Getting that sinking feeling again about the Queen Mary
The latest news on the Queen Mary reminded me of the fact that I’ve never heard of a contractor coming in on any project under budget, no matter how small.
“I know we told you we could get your rumpus room remodeled for $55,500, but the materials and our labor weren’t as expensive as we had anticipated, so it came to just a little shy of $38,000. To whom shall I make out the refund check?” said no contractor in the history of contracting.
And that’s for a rumpus room. A little carpet, a couple sheets of drywall, 160 nails and a bumper pool table. What do you think would happen if you got an estimate on refurbishing and otherwise shoring up a long-neglected ocean liner from the 1930s that’s been sitting in corrosive saltwater since your grandfather was a wee lad in a sailor suit?
Last week, the L.A.-based Urban Commons, the Queen Mary’s new operators and the latest in a long line of dreamers of over-imagined visions of turning the ship into a major tourist destination, announced that the Queen is now a safe place to visit, thanks, mostly, to a new fire safety system.
Urban Commons joins the city, which owns the ship, in possessing an engagingly naive idea of what it takes to get work done.
As LB Post reporter Kelly Puente pointed out in a piece Sunday that in the ship’s ongoing refurbishment, the city budgeted $200,000 to upgrade the long-ignored fire safety system on the Queen. Two years later, when the system was fixed and the ship declared safer, the cost was $5.29 million.
To put that back into your own home-improvement terms, that’s roughly the same as getting an estimate to renovate your kitchen for $3,000 and ending up with a bill for $80,000. Serves you right for hiring a company that tells you they can rebuild your kitchen for the price of a a couple of new iPhones.
I’m not an expert (well, OK, I am, but I’m a self-deprecating expert) but, when a guy says—like a guy from Urban Commons said, “We’ve definitely had some challenges, but you’re dealing with an 82-year-old ship that’s historical in nature, so you can’t just open up the walls”—I immediately think that that should have been considered when figuring out what to budget for the job.
The overruns are found all over the Queen. A $2.3 million estimate for roofing and deck repairs billowed to $5.97 million; a hull paint job and rust repair was penciled out at $1.7 million and actually ran to $2.8 million; a paltry $250,000 estimate for fixing leaking side tanks ended up costing $475,000.
It almost sounds like someone thought they were repairing a 20-year-old condominium unit instead of a mammoth sea vessel that’s been buffeted by the equally vicious forces of time and the elements for more than eight decades.
I don’t have an overabundance of faith in Urban Commons. I don’t believe the company can turn the Queen Mary into the nation’s playground. I don’t believe it will build an entertainment complex on and around the ship that will bring millions of dollars into the city every year.
I can see that it’s an exciting idea. The sparkling artist conceptions of how the ship will look in five brisk years with nicely dressed couples strolling amid fun and fancy restaurants, rock-climbing gyms and an amphitheater with top-name talent are just as fantastical as a Frank Frazzeta-inspired Dodge van paint job. Not gonna happen in real life. Not without someone first spending half-a-billion dollars just to get the ship safe(r) and the whole splended project off the ground. And that figure, judging by the way things are going so far, is not going to be enough—and then having that whole thing be spectacular enough to lure tens of thousands of people each day in a part of the country where the bar is set awfully high for entertainment.
It’s not like Urban Commons has any ground-breaking ideas. In the 50 years the ship has been docked here, everyone’s taken a shot at making a go of the Queen Mary, from carpet-baggers to home-grown fans: Diners Club, Specialty Restaurants, Jack Wrather, Walt Disney (who, admittedly, only bought the ship to get its hands on the Wrather Corp.-owned Disneyland Hotel) and a half-dozen other former operators.
All received sweet deals from Long Beach with nothing much asked except that the Queen Mary be made profitable enough to at least earn its own keep and maybe toss a few coins at the city to buy a swimming pool or pay for a couple of cops.
It’s been a long list of sad failures, with the Queen Mary’s sole accomplishment being that it’s become the premiere icon for the city of Long Beach.
The question now is, will it ever be an icon for success, or is it destined to finally become a symbol for unrealized promises and dreams that come up short or empty?
Tim Grobaty
Tim Grobaty is a columnist and the Opinions Editor for the Long Beach Post. You can reach him at 562-714-2116, email [email protected], @grobaty on Twitter and Grobaty on Facebook.
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