Eastbayri.com

What is up with the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (DOT)? This is the gang that can’t shoot straight. One inept construction project follows upon another. The most recent fiasco is the bridge project in Pawtucket, where the sides do not line up to match. Nobody can say, according to news reports, as to whom is to blame for the millions of more dollars to be spent and the delay in completion. Chances are that the DOT will again be at fault given its past history.

The DOT is chronically dysfunctional and shows no sign of improvement. Chunks of cement falling into the drink underneath the infamous Iway, where cost overruns resulted in mega-millions of extra dollars expended, were met with a shrug of the shoulder by a DOT engineer. The federal government refused further payments of millions of dollars for the construction of Route 403 because of substandard psi ratings. The failure of this “load” capacity again was accompanied by an “Aw shucks, just let it go” reaction.

Recently, Jim Hummel of Barrington, in his “Hummel Report,” exposed the controversy behind the scenes in the saga of the construction of the Barrington Bridge project. (Parenthetically, this DOT report also acknowledged a settlement of a claim involving the Point Street Bridge.) The original construction completion date was Sept. 6, 2006. The project was already 30 months behind schedule due to unresolved design/construction problems. DOT had ponied up at that time an additional $3.5 million in change orders as a result of a faulty Request For Proposal (RFP) occasioned by its engineering department on top of the original $10.3 million tab and yet the project was only 30 percent complete.

More egregiously, rather than acknowledge its fault, the DOT dilly dallied for 30 months before agreeing that the construction company was correct about the faulty subsurface site conditions it had provided to Shire Construction, the builder. DOT had to also pay an additional 5.3 million in 2008 because of its malfeasance. More penalties are pending in a court suit still arising from the project.

An internal investigation not only showed the faulty design tendered by the DOT but also delimited a strong claim for bad faith by a failure to resolve relatively simple issues in a timely manner. The hearing officer found that a 30-month delay by DOT was inherently unreasonable. Because of the failure of DOT to respond in a timely fashion, the hearing officer noted that the state would incur in excess of $1 million in attorney fees if the matter was litigated. He recommended a settlement in light of the legal issues as well as non-legal issues such as the embarrassment of the public disclosure of the facts and circumstances of the agency’s woeful performance in this project. The Barrington bridge project, nonetheless, is in court.

The repeated errors made by this department should precipitate an investigation either by Gov. Chafee’s administration or through a legislative commission. How can the design section make so many “oops” that require change orders because the original specs were wrong? How can the department be trusted to monitor construction projects when a reporter found a DOT inspector snoozing in a parking lot a distance from the site he was supposed to be overseeing?

Of 772 roads/bridges in Rhode Island, a recent study said that 164 are structurally deficient and 61 have weight limits. A Blue Ribbon Panel for Transportation Funding under former Gov. Carcieri’s administration proposed a hike in the gasoline taxes of anywhere from 5 to 10 cents per gallon to fund remediation projects. Putting aside the economics of Rhode Islanders flocking to Massachusetts to purchase gasoline if such a hike happened, the solution merely masquerades the incompetence of DOT. The last thing the state needs is more money being shoveled into the department as it recklessly spends the money it has.

Some leader has to get DOT under control before one more cent is spent or appropriated anew from any source. DOT has paved over its wrongdoing for far too long and it is high time that the structure within that department is excavated by a leader in the state.