Easy Street

The North Central repaving project looked good, at least on paper. Part of Mayor Bob Lanier’s widely acclaimed Neighborhoods to Standard program, the job called for the overlay of tons of asphalt on more than 200 blocks of the barrios due north of downtown, at a cost of more than $2 million. With the newly renovated Moody Park as a backdrop, the North Central area would become the kind of spiffy showcase Lanier loves to create.

But when the plans filtered down to Moh’d Warrad in September 1994, he balked. A quality control engineer who’s been with the city’s Public Works and Engineering Department for six years, Warrad ran a computer check of the neighborhood that showed most streets in the area were not suitable candidates for the proposed roadwork. To confirm the computer analysis, he drove North Central’s narrow, quiet lanes for a firsthand survey of conditions. “With the exception of a few section blocks,” Warrad wrote in a report to his boss, “the rest of the streets exhibited good to excellent riding quality, with a few slightly distressed areas.”

Moreover, Warrad wrote, “the majority of the streets have been overlaid recently (most likely in the past two years).”

“It is my opinion and my professional experience,” he concluded, “that the [city] may invest [its] money more wisely by selecting another neighborhood.”

To Warrad’s superiors in the public works department’s Street and Bridge Division, that wasn’t enough to kill the project. Instead, they ordered that the pavement testing in the North Central area scheduled for later that week proceed as planned. The tests would be conducted by an engineering consulting firm, Terra-Mar, which would drill and analyze core samples. A decision on the overlays would depend on Terra-Mar’s findings. “Should the results of this coring effort validate Mr. Warrad’s opinion,” wrote assistant public works director Philip Barnard, “we will not proceed with reconditioning those streets.”

Three days later, Terra-Mar had the answer. “Most streets appeared in good condition, with some apparently having been overlaid within the last several years,” wrote Terra-Mar’s Kurt Leus. “These streets may be more suited to isolated repair and maintenance rather than rehabilitation and overlay at this time.”

But the opinions of the experts obviously conflicted with other priorities. Three months after Terra-Mar’s report should have closed the book on North Central, the steamrollers were busy. The city went ahead with the project; the contractor laid the final few blocks of asphalt last month.

Since Lanier assumed office, the public works department under director Jimmie Schindewolf has spent more than $4 billion to improve Houston’s infrastructure: some $60 million to build sidewalks; at least $700 million for water system improvements; more than a billion dollars on the greater Houston Wastewater Program; and hundreds of millions more to repair streets, construct storm sewers, fix bridges and otherwise tighten the nuts and bolts that keep the city running. And Lanier wants to ensure that his legacy of public works continues after he leaves office in January: Next week, voters will be asked to approve a new $545-million bond issue, $350 million of which is targeted for additional public works projects.

Lanier’s commitment to infrastructure sets him apart from other municipal officials around the country, who traditionally defer such costly programs in favor of quicker fixes or more glamorous fare. He’s been recognized nationally for his efforts: Last June, President Clinton appointed Lanier chairman of the Rebuild America Coalition, a group of organizations working to reverse the steady decline in the country’s infrastructure. And since the sizzling local economy has allowed Lanier to spend freely while raising taxes only once during his tenure, the public has embraced the improvements.

Indeed, Lanier’s attention to the city’s neighborhoods is generally considered the foundation of his tremendous popularity. Fixing streets and building sidewalks, after all, is what government should be doing.

But as with so many of Lanier’s pets, the public works department has sacrificed sound management practices at the altar of speed. The department’s chief priority — to get all the proposed construction finished and the money spent on schedule, with a minimum of inconvenience to the contractor — has overridden other concerns, including the quality of the finished product.

“We’ve got deadlines to meet,” says a department engineer, “and we’ve got to meet those deadlines no matter what, whether the project is good or not.”

Assistant public works director John Hatch, who heads the department’s Street and Bridge Division, defends the emphasis on deadlines. “If you have a budget, it’s incumbent [upon you] to execute that budget in accordance with the schedule you’ve established,” Hatch says. “Once you’ve established a schedule, you stick to it.”

Hatch argues that nothing has been sacrificed by adhering to deadlines. “I don’t think the process has contributed to additional costs to the city,” he says.

But a three-month Houston Press investigation found more than a few additional costs in the Street and Bridge Division, which is responsible for most of the city’s street, sidewalk and other pavement projects. Though pinpointing an exact figure would take years of digging through file boxes, the amount of money wasted in the pell-mell dash to the finish line can be measured in multiple millions:

* Paving projects routinely fail to meet specifications when tested; some even started to crack and buckle while under construction. Others deteriorated within a year. Yet the contractors are rarely asked to make good on their shoddy work.

* Street overlays that should last seven to nine years have frequently been done on the same blocks less than two years apart; the city’s records are so spotty that no one seems to know the last time a given street was overlaid.

* The city paid about $900,000 for a detailed block-by-block computer analysis of street conditions, but it isn’t used to help analyze the need for roadwork. Until queried about it by the Press, street and bridge chief John Hatch was not even aware of its existence.

* The computerized records are in such a muddle that it’s practically impossible to tell how much a given road project cost the city without piecing together documents from the files.

If the Street and Bridge Division were the sole offender, a solution might be simple. But the Press’s investigation reveals that the problems are spread throughout the public works department. Communication between divisions is lax — on more than one occasion, work done one month has been torn up and redone the next. Projects that violate city standards are often approved over the objections of staff responsible for reviewing and approving plans, and those who persist in complaining are either pulled off the projects or reprimanded. Engineers in top management positions have been replaced by less qualified political appointees with little experience.

In carrying out its mission to overhaul the city’s infrastructure, the public works department has increasingly relied on private consultants to manage its most complex programs, at a cost of millions. In turn, the city has become less and less involved in the design and construction of municipal projects. Contractors and consultants have gained so much clout in the public works department that they virtually dictate changes in the city standards. Combined with an overtaxed inspection staff and a lack of oversight by other city agencies — particularly the controller’s office — the shift to private management has removed most of the checks and balances from the system. What budget controls exist are easily bypassed.

Public works officials acknowledge that mistakes have been made, but they say steps have been taken to rectify them. Hatch says that many of the problems are attributable to former employees who lacked competence and drive. “The reputation of this organization was nonresponsive, or very slow to respond,” says Hatch, who came to the Street and Bridge Division from the Greater Houston Wastewater Program last year. “I’ve tried to turn that around.”

To be fair, in a sprawling bureaucracy the size of the public works department — the largest department in the city, with more than 4,700 employees and an annual budget exceeding $700 million — change comes slowly. But a review of thousands of pages of documents and conversations with more than 30 current and former public works employees throws into doubt the notion that all the department’s problems have been identified and are being corrected.

“You wouldn’t believe the waste and mismanagement,” says an engineer who was hired by the city before Lanier took office. “I see it every day.”

Bob Lanier knows public works. “When I see a street that needs to be redone,” the developer-turned-mayor boasted to The Bond Buyer last May, “I know how much it’s going to cost and whether it’s worth doing.”

Apparently he didn’t look very closely at the North Central area, which was deemed worthy of inclusion in Lanier’s Neighborhoods to Standard program for 1994, despite the good overall condition of its streets. Just who did the deeming isn’t clear, though the entire Neighborhoods to Standard program has been coordinated by the mayor’s office. As always, each City Council district got a piece of the overall pie, and neighborhood organizations had input into the selection process — the North Central Civic Association, represented by Councilman Felix Fraga, lobbied for inclusion in the program.

And the area was included, even though a computer database of city streets showed North Central to be a low priority. That highly detailed computerized list of cracks and other pavement flaws, known as the Pavement and Management Maintenance System (PMMP), was developed by a consulting firm precisely to help determine what streets should be rehabbed, and in what order. (Then again, many of the streets proposed for Neighborhoods to Standard makeovers that were reviewed by the Press looked fine to the PMMP. Perhaps to avoid embarrassment, the city has pretty much stopped using the program, even though it cost about $900,000.)

Moh’d Warrad, the quality control engineer who red-flagged the project, was unaware of the political considerations underlying Neighborhoods to Standard, one of Lanier’s most treasured programs. But Philip Barnard did. In a memo written after Warrad’s initial analysis, Barnard, who then headed the Street and Bridge Division, noted the need to move forward with North Central. “As this project is a Neighborhoods to Standard area,” Barnard wrote, “it is imperative that all efforts to upgrade the streets be undertaken.”

After Warrad presented the evaluation from Terra-Mar that found the project to be unnecessary — complete with a lengthy videotape of almost flawless, mostly smooth-riding streets — Barnard fired off another memo to Warrad’s boss. He attacked the Terra-Mar study, conveniently ignoring the two internal checks that had reached the same conclusion. “The preliminary evaluation by Terra-Mar seems inconsistent with the overall existing conditions,” he wrote, though public works department files contain no evidence to support that claim. “A majority of the streets do require rehabilitation to prevent further damage.”

Barnard then issued a thinly veiled threat. “If the current laboratory does not feel competent in pavement rehabilitation design,” he wrote of Terra-Mar, “it may be prudent to replace them with a laboratory which has demonstrated expertise in this field.”

Terra-Mar, a reputable firm with plenty of city contracts under its belt, stayed on the project. Barnard, who has since left the city, would not discuss what prompted him to push the project forward.

Warrad recalls the whole episode sourly. “It doesn’t matter what you say or do,” Warrad says. “You work in an environment where knowledge and expertise don’t count.”

In December 1994, the city issued a $600,000 contract to Walter A. Smith Paving Contractors for Phase I of the North Central project. The company completed the work at the end of March. On April 28, the city conducted a final inspection of the site and then signed off on the last payment — $12,000 over the original contract amount. A performance evaluation of the contractor noted that the work was performed satisfactorily.

But everything wasn’t satisfactory. Core sampling of the pavement by Terra-Mar the second week in April showed that the job did not meet the contract’s specifications. Of the 203 samples drilled by Terra-Mar, 71 percent flunked the density test, meaning that the asphalt hadn’t been compacted tightly enough and would likely begin to deteriorate more quickly. Warrad forwarded the results to his superiors.

But instead of requiring the construction company to fix the problem, as allowed under the contract, the city did nothing. Meanwhile, Phase II had been put out for bid, and two days before the final inspection of the first phase the city awarded the second contract — to Walter A. Smith Paving Contractors, for $800,000.

Tommy Davidson, who took over the company from Walter Smith six months ago, says that meeting the compacting requirement can be an impossible task if the underlying road is in poor condition. The standard, he says, should be lowered. “That’s what we’ve argued with them for a long time,” Davidson says.

Nevertheless, when the city revised its design standards last year, the compacting standard stayed the same. And John Hatch calls a 70-percent failure rate “unacceptable.”

That wasn’t the first time the city let a seemingly substandard paving job slip by, nor would it be the last. In fact, test results from seven projects examined by the Press showed a more than 50-percent failure rate. Others had no results in the file at all, though Warrad says he always presented them to the appropriate managers for review. “Most of the time we even highlight [the bad results] for them,” Warrad says. “It’s really a typical problem.”

Yet current street and bridge chief John Hatch says he can recall only a few instances in which the poor results prompted the division to withhold payment from the contractor or force any repairs.

The consequence of improperly compacted asphalt is simple. “Earlier pavement failures,” says Warrad. “That’s reality.”

Other construction and design oversights, including failure to stabilize the shifting soils notorious throughout Houston, can contribute to this reality. And reality has struck several times in short order. Within several months of its overlay in 1995, the pavement in the Fidelity Manor area, a series of low-traffic, mostly dead-end streets just outside the northeast corner of the Loop, started to collapse. In the Garden Villas subdivision just west of Hobby Airport, the pavement began to crack in 1996 — while the overlays were still in progress. And Tierwester Street in southeast Houston, a $750,000 complete reconstruction job, cracked and buckled less than two years after its completion.

In those and other cases, the city has eaten the cost of repairs or simply let the streets deteriorate, leaving them in much the same condition they were in before they got their expensive asphalt blankets. The cost to the taxpayers is in the millions.

Just who should be held accountable for the overlay program’s shortcomings is open for debate. Rust/Lichliter Jameson, a consulting firm that has taken over management of the overlay and sidewalk programs from the city, is supposed to keep an eye on each project. City inspectors oversee construction and in theory ensure the quality of the materials. John Hatch has ultimate authority over work done under the aegis of the Street and Bridge Division, which in turn is one of eight divisions under the Engineering, Construction and Real Estate Group (ECRE).

Deputy public works director Buddy Barnes, who in 1996 moved from the wastewater program to head the ECRE group, emphasizes that the city continues to improve its practices — tightening the technical review process, standardizing computer records and filing systems and improving inspector training. “We want to make sure that what goes out the door is a quality product,” Barnes says.

In addition, says Barnes, the last 18 months have seen a number of personnel changes that have made the department more efficient. Some employees, including several chief engineers, moved into the private sector to beat the coming change in administrations; others were encouraged to find alternative employment. “Their performance level did not meet our expectations,” he says.

Whether the situation has significantly changed as Lanier’s tenure draws to a close is hard to measure. Last May, a project that involved rebuilding several intersections around Houston ran into so many roadblocks that the city had to chop several intersections off the project to avoid heavy cost overruns. The changes were necessary, according to a memo from Hatch, because of “poor quality control during the design phase.”

As it turned out, the design had bounced for months among several engineers, winding up in Rust/Lichliter Jameson’s lap. After various buck-passing communiques between Rust and city staff, the project was reviewed by Buddy Barnes. In a hand-scrawled note to Hatch dated August 8, Barnes assessed the situation, saying: “This is a perfect example of no one in control.”

The bridge and intersection at Mercury Drive and I-10 needed improvements. Tamborello Engineering was hired to design the project, and the work was done according to Tamborello’s plans. During construction, a city inspector checked the progress and wrote daily reports.

In February 1994, as the project neared completion, a Texas Department of Transportation employee driving in the area noticed something peculiar: The left-turn lane to the highway’s eastbound feeder headed straight into the I-10 bridge pillars.

After alerting the city to the problem, TxDOT engineer Sally Wegmann wrote a scathing letter to a supervisor in the public works department’s Traffic and Transportation Division. Not only were Tamborello’s drawings faulty, Wegmann wrote, but “it is inconceivable that the city inspectors (or the contractor for that matter) did not notice that this turn lane was aligned either to force a mandatory left turn down the wrong direction of the I-10 frontage street or direct the traffic into the columns if they went straight.”

To prevent a serious accident, the city temporarily blocked the turn lane with barrels. Eventually, the lane was filled in with concrete. Buddy Barnes claims the mishap only cost the city $2,000, but others familiar with the project dispute that figure. “Try adding at least ten grand [to Barnes’s figure],” says one source.

Just who was responsible for the error remains in dispute — Tamborello president Charles Tamborello denies responsibility, saying that his contract didn’t cover the intersection in question.

But no one involved with the project — the designer, the contractor, the city inspectors or anyone else — was held accountable. Maybe that’s because the fault really lay with the philosophy that drives the entire department. “It was rush-rush, like everything else,” says one public works engineer.

When pavement collapses, it’s hard to keep it secret. Motorists don’t hesitate to complain loudly when they run over potholes or plow axle-deep through lakes on streets that were supposed to be free of obstacles. But much of the waste in the public works department hides in places the public rarely sees, outside the high-profile Street and Bridge Division: in countless increased construction costs due to design flaws, in pricey but incompatible computer systems, in an unnecessary storm sewer realignment in the Willowbend subdivision that cost $40,000, in damages paid to contractors for avoidable delays, in a six-figure legal settlement for a botched planning job on Blodgett Street.

After signs of water damage were detected at HPD’s Westside Command Center in 1990, city officials were concerned. And with good reason — the building, a four-story HPD facility, had been completed just five years earlier. When an investigation revealed serious structural flaws in the Dairy Ashford facility, including bowed and cracked walls and other indicators of slab movement, the city sued the designers and builders and hired several consultants to study the problems.

Eventually, the city retained Law Engineering to craft a remedy. Law’s 1993 contract directed the firm to ferret out the source of the problems and seek a short-term fix, as well as design a final solution complete with drawings, specs and bid forms. The work could also be used in the city’s legal fight, Law Engineering’s proposal noted. For this work, which Law completed in 1995, the firm was paid almost $280,000.

Less than a year later, however, the city awarded a $500,000 contract to another consulting firm, Construction Strategies, to give the city technical help in its lawsuit and design both a temporary and long-term solution to the damage — the same work Law Engineering was supposed to have performed.

Jerry Dinkins, an assistant public works director in charge of special projects, at first denied that the contracts overlapped. Law handled the immediate repair problems, Dinkins explained, while Construction Strategies was charged with finding a permanent solution. When the Press noted to Dinkins that the two contracts seem to call for the same services, he blamed Law for the redundancy, claiming the firm dragged its feet and never fully accomplished its mission. “They kept wanting to study the problem more,” Dinkins said. “We weren’t satisfied.”

Nevertheless, Law was paid in full for its services, and the firm continues to do business with the city. “We had recommendations on how the city should move forward,” says Law engineer Michael O’Grady. “The city was uncertain on which direction it wanted to go. At that point, since they didn’t authorize us to proceed any further, our services were ended.”

The Westside Command Station is but one example of the city paying at least twice for the same design work. (See “The Incredible Expanding Contract,” page 12.) The same goes for construction projects: The Press learned of several instances in which asphalt was laid or pavement markings installed, only to be torn up soon thereafter.

Such bungling preceded Lanier’s reign. During the Whitmire administration, a long stretch of Richmond Avenue was reconstructed, then destroyed in order to put in a water line that should have been installed beforehand.

But if the engineers learned any lessons from the Richmond experience, they evidently forgot some of them again. Though the Greater Houston Wastewater Program has overseen an effort to tighten coordination between public works divisions and other city and state agencies, the system still has a few bugs. A fresh coat of blacktop laid by METRO on Fulton was recently dug out to make way for a wastewater project. The public works department’s Traffic Calming Section (yes, that’s its name) plopped speed humps on Brinkman, only to have them scooped up last Christmas for an overlay.

And in July, shortly after the contractor put down permanent pavement markings on North Main Street to culminate a construction project near the University of Houston’s downtown campus, the city milled the markings into oblivion, overlaid the street, then paid the contractor to put the markings down a second time. The repeat performance appears to have cost the city at least $20,000, not including labor, according to contract documents.

Twenty thousand isn’t much when you have a billion dollars to spend every year, but add that to the money wasted on needless overlays, pavement failures, design errors, bloated contracts and other miscues, and the losses take on boondoggle proportions.

On October 14, 1994, City Council passed a motion authorizing final payment on the 1993 District C overlay project. The contractor, Hubco Inc., had been awarded the project more than a year earlier and had completed its job. The final price of $1.31 million was $133,000 more than the original contract price, or 11.34 percent more than budgeted. The Council was asked to bless the deal retroactively, which they dutifully did. The official Request for Council Action from the public works department explained the need for the inflated payment: “Additional streets were added to this contract after the original award at the recommendation of the Street Maintenance Group and evaluation by the Street and Bridge Design Section.”

In other words, someone decided it would be okay to tack $133,000 of work onto a contract without going through the proper procedures, which include submitting any “change orders” above 5 percent of a contract for Council approval.

That wasn’t so unusual in the early days of Lanier’s administration, when procedures and protocols were being revised on an almost daily basis. Besides, getting the projects done quickly — and satisfying the constituents of individual councilmembers — was more important than bothering with technicalities. “Those were decisions that were made at a political level,” recalls a public works engineer who’s spent more than ten years with the city. “Somebody would apply pressure to get other streets added.”

Even a week’s delay was unacceptable. Richard Scott, second in command to Jimmie Schindewolf in engineering matters, summed up the attitude best in an August 4, 1993 memo to then-controller George Greanias. Requesting that the wheels be greased for a trio of overlay projects, Scott wrote: “The Street Reconditioning and Overlay Program is of the highest priority. It is intended that three or four projects be approved each week for overlays in various Council districts. Since the Council will be adjourned during the week of August 11, it is imperative these items be processed in order to avoid negatively impacting the overall project schedule.”

Other fiscal consequences resulted from the headlong rush to tar the streets. A December 1994 request to expand an engineering contract by more than $10,000 was explained this way: “The scope of services increased because over a two-month period of time, 15 asphalt overlay projects were awarded and begun in the [overlay] program. This number of projects, which began simultaneously, overwhelmed our city inspection staff.”

The department, which Schindewolf completely reorganized in 1994, has stabilized somewhat, but some habits die hard. On May 30, Cecil Boone, a manager working under the consulting firm managing the overlay and sidewalks programs, held a preconstruction conference with Brown & Root for the second phase of the Fidelity Manor overlay project. At the meeting, Boone took it upon himself to expand Brown & Root’s contract, adding a number of items to its original scope. Brown & Root finished the job September 2 and submitted a bill for $469,000 — $42,000, or almost 10 percent, over budget.

Asked about the unilateral move, which should not have been made without Council approval, Street and Bridge Division chief John Hatch admitted that Boone had overstepped his bounds. “He doesn’t have the authority,” Hatch says. “It is totally unacceptable that this would happen at this point.”

After reprimanding Boone and others who let the add-on slip by, Hatch directed that an official change order be prepared for Council. He did the same for the rest of the projects Boone had decided to pad. “Cecil is to issue a memo to you on the other four or five projects, which are just getting started, where he is changing the streets and scope of work,” one of Boone’s colleagues e-mailed to Hatch on October 15. “We can get change orders out on these immediately.”

Just how common such bending of the rules has been could take years to discover, since the public works department’s computer systems can’t spit out complete financial reports on paving projects. Missing are the change orders, which detail the cost overruns, though Hatch says the department’s software is being updated to absorb every bit of relevant data. And the majority of change orders can evade the Council’s advance radar, since any payment of overruns totaling less than 5 percent can be executed by the department. “I think you can make a case that the way records are kept isn’t the most efficient,” admits public works spokeswoman Marty Stein.

It’s even hard to get a handle on how much money the public works department spends in a year. A formal request for annual totals since 1994 took days to produce. The money comes from so many different sources, Stein explained, that it’s tough to pull it together in one place. “You have to see the budget book to understand how complicated this is,” she says.

By the time anyone figures it out, Lanier will be long gone.
Of course, his legacy will remain. And while many will remember how he built a sidewalk next to the local elementary school or fixed the potholes downtown, others will have less fond associations — Beth Mo-lenda, for example, who lives with her family on Donna Bell Lane in the Oak Forest neighborhood just outside the northwest corner of the Loop. Molenda was startled when the bulldozers showed up in June and began preparations for an overlay. After all, the area had been repaved about two years earlier. And Donna Bell is a dead end with almost no traffic. “None of the streets were in bad shape,” Molenda says. “Believe me, they were quite passable in comparison to the majority of the streets in the city of Houston.”

Worse, the heat from the newly laid asphalt damaged the grass and trees along the street, leaving a browned, burnt zone Molenda says is still quite evident. On nearby Glebe Road, the contractor failed to mill the existing overlay and laid blacktop up to the curb line, causing instant flooding each time it rained.

The inspector assigned to the project didn’t call the contractor on the problems, but the neighbors certainly did. Following widespread complaints, the city asked the contractor to remill the pavement and fix the job according to specifications. At first, John Hatch said he thought the city would pay for the extra work. Now, he’s not sure. “It seems clearer to me now that the contractor owes us,” Hatch says. “He should pay for the correction.”

In response to a query from the Press last July, Hatch wrote a memo reviewing the complaints. A forester concluded that the damage to the foliage wasn’t permanent, he wrote, adding that “a review of available records did not indicate any overlay of streets that were overlaid within the past two years.”

“We also point out that the purpose of the Neighborhoods to Standard Program is to bring the streets within the target neighborhoods’ boundaries up to city standards,” Hatch continued.

Asked if those standards are written down or spelled out in any way, Hatch said he didn’t know. “I’m sure we have something in mind when we say we want to bring a certain neighborhood up to city standards,” Hatch said.

Molenda has her own idea. “The more we come up to standards,” she says, “the worse our neighborhood gets.