Imagine hiring a contractor to redo your kitchen. He speaks of new cabinets that will neatly hold your wine glasses, the plates, the A & W root beer mugs. Oh, how wonderful! He'll replace the kitchen sink and put in a new one with triple wells. And the countertop, pure granite! You could cut your food right on top, or at least cool down hot fudge. It'll only take a month, and the best thing is that it will only run you $10,000! Sign me up!
The crew arrives and starts to work. It seems to be taking a bit long to get the old cabinets off. The sink is gone and the water pipes are capped off, where's my countertop? All I see is the cheap wood framing underneath. And it's been two months!
"Well", he says, "I've encountered some unforeseen problems. The cabinets were NAILED to the wall, you don't know how hard it is when that happens. And there were water pipes IN THE WALL that went to the sink. Who would have expected THAT! The people who built your house didn't know what they were doing. Oh, the granite countertops are backordered and might get here in a month or two."
"AND...I need MORE MONEY to finish it off because of all of my problems."
What do you do? He's already taken your $10,000. Do you call the BBB and complain that this guy's a crook and your signed contract has a price on it that he's exceeding? Do you tell him to finish it off NOW for his set price? Or do you do what a lot of cities like Poway would do, just pay him whatever he wants?
Let's look at Oak Knoll Road, a raggedy road if there ever was one. It really needed to be improved, so the city of Poway decided to have it repaved, widened, put in new sidewalks, put in a big sewer line to help out the business park. So Poway plops down roughly $3,071,893 to get the job done. Construction started Oct 5, 2009, with a completion date of April 28, 2010, a mere 7 months later. WHAT A DEAL!!! A brand spankin' new road with a big sewer line, sidewalks, oooohhh....
And then what happened? "Inadequate existing road base and pavement, groundwater, and rock removal" that was somehow unanticipated, ran the costs up and delayed the completion. So the city ponies up another $450,000. Good, now the job will get done. But wait, Batman, that's not the end of it! Now, the contractors need ANOTHER $680,000 on top of this to finish it up because of "continued difficult site conditions...increase pavement overlay quantities, and other items." (italics mine) And the end date is now the end of June, 2011. Our seven month job has just turned into a 20 month job. And our $3million job is now $4.2 million. And it's still not over! The undergrounding of the utilities has not been finalized either, that's going to go until the end of July due to "coordination issues", so the final project will be done in August 2011.
22 months!!!
Unless, of course, they run into more "unforeseen" problems that delays it again and adds even more to the costs, which the city will pay, no problem. It's a shame that this isn't even out of the ordinary. The timeline triples in length, the costs increase by 37%, and no one bats an eye.
(The $ and "problems" are all listed in agenda item 4.2 in the June 21, 2011 Poway City Council agenda.)
It's a shame that these construction contractors can't be held to the same standards that home contractors and auto mechanics are held to, they violate their contracts, they could lose their license. But if the job is contracted by the city and you blow over your costs and deadlines, you'll probably get another job from the city as a reward!!!
NOTE: I've been provided with a current updated workman's comp insurance policy. The following is now out of date.
To top it off, Mountain Movers (doing the work, License number 767120), expiration date for Workers Comp is 06/01/2011 and "The license may be suspended on 07/06/2011 if the workers´ compensation insurance policy is not filed with the CSLB." according to the "Check A License" page. Who gets stuck with the insurance claims if someone gets hurt in the meantime?
