. >> joe karlson. >> mr. chairman and members of the board. i'm not necessarily against this increase you're being asked to support today, however, i want to raise a couple of issues. i think it's relevant to this one and that's back in february of this year, a rep who was a sub contractor to the tunnelling contractor submitted to your staff a scope and budget and their proposal for doing not all the work that's needed for the extension of the subway theater, but part of it was $10.3 million, i believe and your staff has apparently negotiated that down to $5.5 million which sounds like quite an achievement. i won't get into how they did it, but i did want to say a couple of things. let me say a couple of things about what they did. they did it biceps rating the bids into separate bids and that could be good, but usual ly when you have a number of primes doing tight work, the owner tends to have problems so that's something you should be aware of. they bid it out separately. the other thing was that a rough excluded a number of items from its s