In Sunday’s El Paso Times, Crazy Joe Meunch says he wants to know what’s going on with San Jacinto Plaza.
Somebody in authority must answer a question here: Whose back is City Council protecting on the absurdly screwed-up $4.5 million San Jacinto Plaza project?
Is the city protecting beleaguered contractor Basic IDIQ, for lawyer/legal reasons? Or, our city reps go into their secret “executive sessions” to protect city employees from having screwed up?
We talk about transparency in government. People run for offices on a platform of transparency. Then the attorneys, apparently, get to them. Scare them.
Somebody has to know who screwed up on San Jacinto.
You might not be surprised to find out I have a theory. You might not be surprised because I’ve expressed my theory here on El Chuqueño before. It’s the same reason that Country Club took so long to finish.
When we dropped $200 million on the ballpark and our new City Halls, that money had to come from somewhere. I imagine that it put the City in a bind. Cash flow was a problem. Country Club didn’t get finished till this year’s tax receipts started coming in. Likewise work on the plaza was at a near standstill till February.
Coincidence?
If we can drop two hundred million bucks with no repercussions, let’s do it again. And again. And again.
Even if it wasn’t $200 million, it cost something, right? And not just a little.
I reckon our city leaders had to decide which projects to fund, and the plaza and Country Club Road had to get postponed.
So who are they protecting? The hornswogglers? Or maybe they don’t want us to know that they got hornswoggled.
Who they are protecting is the Engineering & Construction Department employees who are utterly incompetent and Parks & Rec employees who routinely step over their authority. The competent employees are fleeing from the City Employment and leaving only the incompetent ones behind.
San Jacinto suffers from a particularly bad version of this: The City pitched one plan which builders and general contractors were encouraged to bid upon. In that bid process, Basic IDIQ bid the project for $1.5 million less than the next closest bidder. That, right there, should have raised a flag that something was wrong.
Once that bid process was complete and and the building was underway, Basic IDIQ, the city started making “changes” to the project. Parks & Rec employees (who have ZERO say in projects) started directing work and making changes.
The same thing happened at Barron Park. One of the irrigation subcontractors was performing the installation of the system. Parks & Rec employee named Gloria entered upon the project, and with NO AUTHORITY WHATSOEVER, gave explicit direction to the Subcontractor’s employees, bypassing the ENTIRE chain of command (general contractor, general contractor’s foreman, subcontractor owner). Gloria gave explicit instructions as to how she wanted the irrigation pipe put together (she “wanted to see purple primer on the pipe”) and said in no uncertain terms that if it wasn’t taken apart and done her way that they system would be rejected. The Subcontractor employees complied.
Engineering & Construction came to inspect the work 3 weeks later and was horrified. The subcontractor employees had done exactly what Gloria had instructed them to do. The Engineering & Construction inspector demanded that all the work be torn out and replaced, and he gave his OWN set of directions as to how HE wanted it done.
The City can’t get it’s act together because it has no unified voice. All the people of the city are working autonomously, and their mindset is “to hell with everybody else, do it MY way.”
Thanks for the insight.