City Engineer Leon Barba, at the request of council member Daphne Tenorio, provided a status report on the various road bond projects at Tuesday’s City Council meeting. Here is Barba’s report:
"Let me start off with the Marketplace project. That’s from City Lights to Burleson Road, about three-quarters of a mile. Construction is underway. Capital Excavation is our contractor on that project. They are working on earthwork utilities and they’ve even started on the bridge piers for the two bridges we have on that project. As of Oct. 8 when they submitted their first request for payment, 13 percent of the project has been complete. They’ve only used 6.5 percent of their construction time, so we’re ahead of schedule. There’s a couple of items that we’re still working with, issues we have on the project. We’re working on some slope easements. We’re negotiating with the developer, but we still need quite a bit more right-of-way. And there’s some utilities we’re still trying to get moved, so we’re trying to get those moved as quickly as we can.
"Goforth from I-35 frontage to Bunton Creek Road: That’s 1.2 miles. Plans are approximately 99 percent complete. When you get a set of plans from the engineers, what you do is get not only the plans that you build the structure off of, the roads off of, but you also get a project manual that goes along with that. That project manual has your contract documents and your specifications to build the project. As of right now we have the plans but we don’t have the project manual so right now we are considering that project about 99 percent complete as far as the design goes. There’s two parcels pending. We need one for drainage and we’re expecting to close that one Nov. 6. We have another property we’re looking at putting a water line on and we’re still trying to determine how much we’re going to need on that property. So those are the only two properties we need work on.
"Let me give you an update on the utility providers that are working on the relocations. PEC has done their plans. Time Warner has completed their relocation plans. Verizon has their relocation plans complete, they’ve got their material ordered and they’re already drawing up their contract. Texas Gas has completed their relocation plans and they plan to be complete by December of this year. Center Point plans to be complete by mid-November. We hope to begin construction in March, 2016. Right now we’re working with consultants to pin an exact date down. Expected construction time is 10 months.
"I broke out the Goforth Road extension project. That’s the one that goes from Bunton Creek to Kyle Parkway — that’s about .2 of a mile. Plans are again about 99 percent complete, and we’re waiting on the project manual for that project. There’s two landowners involved, but we have not made an offer yet or asked them to donate or let us know what they want for the property. We’re still holding off on that. We’re estimating construction time on this project at five months, but if we include it with the Goforth project it might add a month to that.
"On the Bunton Creek Road project — from I-35 to Lehman Road — the plans again are 99 percent complete. We expect to get the project manual and all plan sheets submitted on Oct. 30 of this year. There are two parcels pending on Bunton Creek Road. One is in the process of being replatted and the second one is in the closing process, so we’re real close, literally. Utility providers are working on that plan also. The earliest estimated date for road construction is August of 2016. We want to give the Goforth project time to get some drainage in so it can tie into it. And that time line is 12 months.
"Burleson Street, from Miller Street back to the I-35 frontage road, is about 1.3 miles. The plans are about 90 percent complete. They were submitted today (Tuesday). We had a little bit of a delay in getting those plans because we’re still negotiating with St. Anthony on trying to get some approvals from them to do some work on a retention pond. So we’ve already met with them and talked to them about it. We’ve already begun the right-of-way process. Unfortunately we thought we were going to have to get six parcels; it’s now up to 12. So that’s another change of our plans. We estimate we are going to start that project in November of 2016 and we’re expecting that project to take about 18 months but that’s going to be because of the railroad work that needs to be done there.
"On the Lehman Road project — this is 150 to Bunton Creek Road, 1.6 miles — the plans are 90 percent complete. They’re supposed to be submitted in mid-November. There are a couple of properties we’re having some issues with. One we’re trying to identify who the property owner is and another one we’re having some problems because it is so low that when we build the road up we’re going to have a problem with access to that property. We’re still trying to figure that out — how we’re going to provide access to that property. As far as the right-of-way acquisition process, we’re about 20 percent complete and we’re going to have to buy 13 parcels. We estimate that construction to start in March of 2017 and the construction time frame is 15 months."
These projects should have been ready to go not long after the bonds were approved! You don't go to the bank and get a loan and then a year or two later produce the business plan. This is poor planning and managing and for what the people getting paid to do that job are, then we are definitely not getting our moneys worth. In my line of work I have to have projects ready to submit for capital requests and if they are approved I usually have no more than 2 months to activate that project and begin work. The quotes and plans need to be up to date and it is no problem to call vendors again and again to update quotes if need be. The local and state governments need to be run like a business and that is to satisfy it's customers and be responsible for every dollar given to them. We pay way too high of taxes not to expect this!
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We deserve better
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