Tuesday: League of Women Voters Sets Undergrounding Forum

A utility underground project that went wrong will be the focus of a presentation by The League of Women Voters of Piedmont this evening.

The meeting is at 7:30 p.m. tonight (Tuesday) in the City Council Chambers, 120 Vista Ave., Piedmont.

“We thought the community needed way more information,” said Tam Hege, president of the LWVP, which has invested great effort and extra funds in recent months on the activities of its Underground Task Force. “(Past President) Lianne Campodonico and Steve Weiner were just really influential in pushing the league to take this on.”

“The league is providing an opportunity for the community to give voice to concerns and remedies in an arena where diverse perspectives are welcome, each individual is treated with respect and where we can look for common ground in an effort to sustain a robust community,” stated Campodonico in a LWVP news release.

The league task force looked at the city’s experience with the Piedmont Hills utility undergrounding project, an effort financed by private homeowners and PG&E, with a district set up and supervised by the city. Cost overruns in the Piedmont Hills project resulted in a city contribution of more than $2 million.

“It’s hard to tell how much money they’ve actually spent because they’ve spent all this money on lawyers,” said Hege.

Litigation has been initiated, with mediation being attempted, per terms of contracts, according to a March draft report by Mayor Dean Barbieri in his role as a member of the city’s Audit Sub-committee.

The task force, composed of longtime Piedmont residents with engineering, accounting and construction experience, looked at aspects of the undergrounding overrun that bear on city governance and future undergrounding projects. Its February “Summary of Preliminary Findings” is at this link.

Task force members are Alex Gunst, Mary Heller, Rob Hendrickson, Al Peters and Kathleen Quenneville.

The task force found that “there was no clear designation from the city administrator (or the City Council) as to whom or which department should be responsible for managing the project through design and construction.”

In Barbieri’s report for the Audit Sub-committee, he wrote, “In  the  Piedmont  Hills  district,  more  direct  contact  occurred  between  the  city  clerk  and  the  construction  entities,  including  the  engineers  and  contractors,  and  there  was  more  of  a  blurring  of  lines  between  the  roles  of  the  director  of  public  works  and  the  city  clerk  until  January  2010.”

In the future, the mayor recommended, a dedicated project manager should oversee such a project and “the responsibilities for  the  financial,  administrative  and  supervisorial  aspects  of  the  project  must  be  known  and accepted by all of the staff involved.”

 The LWVP task force also found:

• a failure by engineers or project managers to review soils reports and understand the risk of trenches running into bedrock, one major reason for cost overruns.
• arithmetic errors in quantities of materials needed in project documents.
• the city’s bid documents allowed a bidder to be chosen using a relatively high cost per cubic yard of rock encountered, which compounded expenses when workers struck a great deal of rock.