As I had mentioned in the past, the project is so large that the general contractor couldn’t possibly have all the resources to complete it on their own, they would have to use sub-contractors which is common practice in the industry.
Imagine not being surprised this afternoon when I shot this photo and observed three other trucks with the same labeling begin initial demolition today. No where to be seen were the red trucks of the general. That’s right folks, we could have split this project into smaller bids with separate smaller contractors instead having a middle-man (general contractor) skimming our tax dollars.
Another organized crime project. What’s new? Business as usual, a city of 200k with a half billion budget. It’s Chicago styled corruption.
Is the construction company tied to the mayor and certain council members?
How do you think construction works? Do you think anyone on the city staff has the experience or is capable of GC’ing a project like this? I highly doubt it. Every decent sized construction project has a GC, it would be mass chaos without one.
Dan you are 100% correct, and as I mentioned above you will always have to use subs. That is NOT my point. My point is how did the general find all these subs to do the work, was able to garner the bids but at the end of the day only ONE general submitted a bid? I am not suggesting that we split it up into 100 bids but we could easily split it into 4-5 separate projects.
Add the fact that over 20 engineers and techs work for the city, and they could have used their due diligence to make this more fiscally diligent.
Here’s how it is typically done. Bid request sent out to a few general contractors. Then the general contractor has a network of subs they work with, the subs then send their bids to the GC and the GC then submits their bid.
What has been happening lately is everyone is so busy and short of help that a lot of bids get turned down in the submittal process. This is happening everywhere in town not just on city projects. There is a pretty short list of GC that are capable of running a project of this size so I’m guessing that played into it as well.
I am aware of how it works, but the city could have easily been the construction manager at risk. There are other ways to skin a cat.
all those subs submitted bids to journey for their part of the project. the question is “how much did journey bump those bids up?” and “how much of the extra 10 million + is going directly into journeys pockets?”
seems like maybe an audit is in order since it is taxpayer money but our gutless council would never do such a thing… especially since at least 3 of them are in the bag.
Most of the bridges like this one, which was built in the 1970s, are being destroyed daily. It’s time we preserved one like this one. AND, to make everyone happy, we’ll designate the bridge as a historic area, then you can do anything to it you want to like the new fat houses in McKennan Park, or how about the “restored” and “preserved” 8th Street bridge with its new white railing columns and bannisters?