Boulevard Construction Watch

FDOT has announced that the construction project on North Roosevelt Boulevard is projected to be 44 days behind schedule.   The original contract estimating a construction timeline of 820 days has been extended to 880 days [as of March 31^st] due to rather generous approvals of weather and vacation days, getting the contractor off the hook for the $ 10,000 + /day disincentive fee for the additional 60 days.

We’ve now entered the second year of this two-year construction project.

According to the schedule projection “fact sheet” presented to the public on the FDOT website, the two lanes on the bayside should be complete by the end of April [which obviously is not going to happen] and work on the business side of the street should have begun April 1st. 

Jacki Hart of AMEC, the engineering firm that is supervising the work on the Boulevard, told Key West The Newspaper that there is no real delay as it is not unusual for projects of this size to finish twenty to forty days past the original estimate.   She couldn’t comment on the schedule found on the FDOT website, stating that AMEC [the overseers of the scheduling] had not had any input into that document; it had been created by Dean Walters, the FDOT’s public relations spokesperson for the project.

Dean Walters, however said that, while the construction timeline [shown below] had been created by SWC, the company he represents, it had also been approved by the FDOT regional office in Miami.  “It’s just such a large project, so complicated,” said Walters, “that it is to be expected that people will not understand the schedule.”

In the meantime, the chart on FDOT’s offical website still indicates that Phases 1A, 2A, and 3A will be finished by the end of April.   Those areas include the two lanes on the bayside that span from Eisenhower to the very end of North Roosevelt.

FDOT did finally send us an updated official scheduling diagram, but most of the job identification numbers have been changed and don’t match the previous diagrams.  Some jobs are scheduled to finish before they’ve begun.  It is a miracle that anyone can figure out how to make payments to the contractors.

So, what is going on behind the green fence?  Well, one thing that is interesting is that FDOT has not assigned anyone to test the utility work other than the contractor itself.  As we previously reported, one of the subcontractors on the Boulevard project, John Chaney, was caught in a bribery scandal in Miami Dade over some shoddy sewer work.   Some $4 Million dollars of sewer work had to be dug back up at a cost of $3.3 Million.  It is hard to understand how, with a subcontractor who was caught bribing an inspector employed on this very job, it could seem reasonable to allow contractors to be in charge of their own inspections.

In the meantime, businesses on the Boulevard are bracing themselves for a long, slow summer after a peak business season that showed earnings of 40% lower than when the Boulevard was running in both directions.

We’d appreciate any further tips for our ‘Boulevard Construction Watch.’   Somebody has to do it.