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Welcome to
Beautiful Downtown Miami
by Rebecca Wakefield My journalistic interests are eclectic, but don’t usually include sidewalks. That changed after a citizen watchdog recently sent me some photos of the grandly named Flagler Street Marketplace Streetscape Project. As you can see from these photos, this is not too impressive a job. “I have worked in downtown Miami for 30 years, and I have to say that in the past couple of years it has never looked worse,” this citizen told me. “The trees that once gave shade were replaced with asphalt. Then they removed a brick sidewalk which was never maintained, but not in bad condition, and left an uneven and unsafe surface for months.” The two of us walked up and down a few blocks of Flagler just west of Biscayne Boulevard. We dodged loose tiles, holes, crumbling sidewalk edges, exposed electrical wires and other minor hazards. Like most people who frequent downtown, I’m usually oblivious to the sidewalks, what with all the other distracting landscape eyesores. But I can’t imagine how someone in a wheelchair would navigate this without mishap. It’s exceedingly lawsuit-friendly. “See, they started replacing the bricks with a thin tile,” the citizen pointed out. “They did this in small sections without completing the previous block. This also went on for months and nothing is completed. What has happened is that the tiles have been broken or are missing, which is expected if they are not properly placed. What are they thinking?” Then I saw the price tag for this boondoggle: almost $11 million and counting. Then I learned the city planned to add another $749,305 to the contract, as of this week’s City Commission meeting. I am so clearly in the wrong business. How do I get one of these consultant-to-the city gigs? What are the actual requirements, if job performance is not one? Suspecting I might need subpoena powers to figure that one out, I opted instead for one of Commissioner Tomas Regalado’s patented quotes. “It should be called the Performing Arts Center Streetscape Project,” he quipped (because of the vast overruns of time and money). “This is about highly paid consultants that are not going their job.” The consultant in question is the Corradino Group, hired last year to oversee the construction of the Flagler Street project. This July, the City Commission reluctantly increased Corradino’s $750,000 contract to $1 million because the Flagler Street project was so far behind. The discussion was enlightening. Commissioner Linda Haskins questioned the substantial increase and why the city didn’t bid the project out. City staff told her it would actually end up costing more to switch companies at this late date. “I do have a problem,” Regalado cut in. “I still don’t understand — why do they charge so much just for supervising a project that is so limited? It’s only Flagler. I mean, it’s not that we’re building the whole Biscayne Boulevard. It’s only a few blocks on Flagler Street.” Commissioner Joe Sanchez complained that this type of situation was happening far too often with city capital improvement projects. “In the city, whenever you finish [a project], it’s perfectly fine with us, and it puts us in a bind,” he said. “[The city] needs to have teeth to prevent those types of inconveniences and changes of orders and bad practices.” Regalado once again asked the relevant questions. Why, he wanted to know, weren’t the construction supervisors on top of the situation from the beginning? City Manager Peter Hernandez reiterated that the city had gotten itself in a bind on this project. “Even though it may be ugly, at this point, with the construction contract running late … we need to cover it for our own good,” he explained. “We need to, in essence, move forward.” So the commission did, with only the rascally Regalado dissenting. Never mentioned by commissioners or staff at the meeting was how the Corradino Group came to get the contract in the first place. As the Miami Herald’s scrappy Mike Vasquez reported previously, the Corradino Group also employs the husband of Mary Conway, the city’s chief of operations. Conway, he reported, was “significantly involved” with deciding which companies were preapproved for city work, when she was the city’s head of capital improvement projects. Conway was promoted to an assistant city manager position by former Manager Joe Arriola shortly before he left this summer. She was also the recipient of a $10,671 performance bonus. The company doing the actual construction is MCM (Magnum Construction Management), which was hired in 2004 to do the job for about $9.1 million. Last December, they were bumped up to $11.1 million to deal with “hidden/unforeseen conditions.” And now the city wants to give them another $749,305. This is the explanation I got from the city, via e-mail: “The original scope of work only included to replace the tile and not the concrete sidewalks underneath. Once the old tile was removed, it became evident of the poor condition of the sidewalk underneath and the concrete sidewalks had to be replaced in order to meet the requirements of contract documents. Furthermore, major underground utility conflicts as well as FPL utility vaults along Flagler Street prevented the expeditious replacement of the sidewalks.” Translation: The city gave marching orders to a contractor without first ascertaining the full scope of the job (city staff told me the project was originally designed by the Downtown Development Authority and then given to the city to fund and manage it). Then everyone involved went into CYA mode while pedestrians, hapless downtown businesses and taxpayers paid and paid. “The culture in the city of Miami is, ‘Let’s move on and turn the page,’ but that’s not right,” says Regalado. “People should be held accountable.” When will the madness end? The sidewalk tile is scheduled to be “substantially completed by Nov. 17, 2006, weather permitting,” according to the city’s Capital Improvement Department. I think maybe around Nov. 18, I’ll go out there and check. Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com. |