At least one proposal for the $120 million remaking of State Street and the ring roads around Purdue University was so detailed that the boxes of financial and engineering plans were delivered to the city in a U-Haul truck.
“That’s a true story,” Dave Buck, West Lafayette city engineer, said Thursday evening after a joint city-university ended nearly a month comparing and scoring two competing bids to develop State Street. “This is a complicated thing we’re working with.”
Now the public gets about three weeks to do the same evaluation after the city and university’s Joint Board recommended a State Street development proposal from a team led by Los Angeles-based investment firm Plenary Group.
Plenary Group — along with its collection of Indiana-based contractors — was one of two bidders on a project that Mayor John Dennis has spent the past three years touting as a transformative moment for the city and Purdue.
“This is when it gets real,” Dennis said. “This is when we open the curtain and we see what this is going to be.”
It wasn’t quite that easy. Plenary Group officials were not in attendance and weren’t immediately available to comment. And that truckload of plans and details had been whittled down, but still stood in three piles, each a good six inches tall.
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