You may have noticed that the City settled with Basic IDIQ this week on the San Jacinto Plaza project. DavidK at RefusetheJuice noticed, and he said something about it, in this post titled What is the truth about San Jacinto?.
NO DEAL WAS REACHED HERE. The contract was closed out without any penalties or deductive change orders being charged to the contractor. “Retainage” is a percent of the final contract that the city keeps until the job is completely finished. This makes sure the contractor comes back to fix warranty issues etc. At the end of the period, they get that retainage back in a big check. That’s exactly what happened here.
The article states that the contractor owed $551,000 to the city. The retainage was $456,884. My math shows that the contractor owes the city almost $100,000 over the retainage amount. The city should have kept the retainage and billed them for another $100,000.
Instead of losing out on the retainage, they had their sins washed away and were given $456,884. Sounds awesome to me.
If you take out all the bullshit in the story it’s quite simple. The contractor got his retainage as if the project was executed perfectly. Mentioning liquidated damages and deductive change orders is worthless here because they were not charged or deducted. The contract just ended… that’s it. You were lied to and all these dollar figures thrown out in the story are put there to confuse you.
Ouch! But that’s not all. In a follow-up post, Mr. K questions how much the contractor really got paid:
A commenter brought it up below and I received several emails on what the final contract price really was. Remember, the contractor was roughly half of what the other bidders were – $7.3 million or so. We were told the contractor would perform all the work for half the price two legitimate, longtime local contractors said they could do it for.
NOT TRUE.
But you knew that.
Retainage on these projects is usually five percent of the total contract price. The retainage was about $450,000. That would mean the contract was for $8 million dollars. Unless they changed the retainage rules for this project, something went horribly wrong.
So what’s new? Another day, another duplicitous story emanating from City Hall.
Over at TheLionStar blog, Jaime Abetia has the red ass for Republican candidate for sheriff Tom Buchino.
And that is really the point that I have been making about Buchino. Take a look at any of his social media, look him up on YouTube, etc and you will see that he clearly has an agenda of further militarizing the Sheriff’s Department if elected.
. . .
So here’s a quick summary of the rhetoric he used just in this one video [in the original post]. He used the word terrorism or a variant of the word 6 times in a video that is under 3 minutes in length. 7 times if you count use of the word jihad.
The word “buchino,” by the way, is Italian for “little hole,” according to Google.
Over at ElPasoSpeak, Brutus, in his polite, understated way, takes on the City over San Jacinto Plaza, our local legislators lecturing us on the EPISD bond issue, and EPISD test scores. Among other things.
And Max Powers wants to know why El Paso State Representative Cesar Blanco has an opinion on the EPISD bond proposal if he lives in San Antonio.
And check out the comments on all these blogs. They’re crowd-sourcing the truth (or some version of it).