What are we doing with Doherty?

Thanks to Steven Foskett for getting in today's Telegram and Gazette that the Worcester City Council is getting updates on the building projects at South High and Doherty (not North, as the headline has). It's in the ridiculously-difficult-to-navigate City Manager portion of the Council agenda for Tuesday; check page 32 and following.
South has actual dirt being moved around, so clearly something is happening over there. But what's going on with Doherty?
You might remember that I asked this back in August, as well, when it had been six months since the school had been accepted to Feasibility. Well, now it has been a year.
The Feasibility phase of the program requires that the city:

...document their educational program, generate an initial space summary, document existing conditions, establish design parameters, develop and evaluate alternatives, and recommend the most cost effective and educationally appropriate preferred solution

And what is it that we're told the City is going to be doing now?

The City of Worcester has selected an Owner’s Project Manager to assist in the oversite of all aspects of this project. In December, DPW&P’s Architectural Division issued a Request for Design Services to secure an architect to conduct the Feasibility Study. The MSBA and the City of Worcester has scheduled a Designer Selection Panel Meeting on March 12, 2019 to review the five submittals received. The MSBA will also schedule interviews for the selected firms in early April. The City and MSBA anticipate an architect to be under contract for this work by May 1, 2019. 

The selected architect will begin the Preliminary Design Program immediately after contract execution. This study will determine the required program needs for a comprehensive high school with an enrollment of 1670 as determined by the MSBA and Worcester Public Schools. The Preliminary Design Program will establish the needed infrastructure required to meet the program. It is anticipated the Preliminary Design Program will be completed and submitted to MSBA by August 1, 2019. Along with the development of the Preliminary Design Program, the City, architect, and OPM will begin to study options that will lead to a Preferred Schematic Report. This Report exams the condition of the existing facility and the requirements to upgrade it to design current standards. This Report will also study the existing building’s ability to accommodate the design program or the existing building with additions. The Report will also examine building a new facility at the current site or at an alternate site. The MSBA has established the June 2020 Board Meeting to act on the Preferred Schematic Report and authorize Schematic Design.

That's...everything in the Feasibility phase, save selection of the Owner's Project Manager, which maybe you should have mentioned the name of. So what has the city been doing for the past year? As far as this report reveals, nothing. And the school website doesn't even having a building link on it.

There's a few reasons why this matters. First, nothing else is moving until Doherty does. Want a new Burncoat? Not til Doherty moves. Noticing we have some aging elementary schools? Not til Doherty moves. Doherty is the bottleneck in the system.
Also, notice that there have been no meetings and no notices about what is happening. This tends to be the way the city operates, so it can then spring a "deadline's looming, we have to do this" option. The obvious version of this is the city says, "sorry, the only option we have is to take Newton Hill." The less obvious version of this is the city has brought to their attention that most of the unbuilt space within Doherty's quadrant is preserved open space, parkland or otherwise. Because the city seems stuck on the notion of a suburban campus, they're looking for acreage, just like they did for Worcester Tech.
It's useful to note that Worcester Tech took as long as it did (once we started trying) because the city was sued over the project. I would assume the same would happen if the city tried to take other preserved open space for the program. There are other options; we could convert buildings. We could build up.
The first thing we have to concede, though, is that Doherty isn't in the suburbs.
I will also reiterate: This is public funding for a public project of major concern. There should be regular public meetings happening. There are not.