The new, state-of-the-art, unoccupied lifeguard station at the end of Grand Avenue stands just a few yards away from a trailer that currently houses Pacific Beach’s lifeguards. For the past two summers, a peak staff of 23 has operated out of the doublewide.
With a third summer fast approaching, the lifeguards remain in a state of limbo ” the contractor being paid to build the station was banned from the site on April 17 with work to be done.
Discontent over the Pacific Beach station’s progress is shared by all parties involved: the city, the construction company and nearby business owners. The finger-pointing among them weaves a web of blame, but provides little clarity as to why the station is still not yet completed.
The Project
The lifeguards are eager to move into their new home, but will not do so until the project is completely finished, to the dismay of city officials who say the building is ready for occupancy despite outstanding fixes. According to Lt. John Greenhalgh, director of training for the San Diego Lifeguard Service, his staff will conduct their own tests of the building before moving out of the trailer.
“We’ll do a one-week training and testing to make sure everything is working properly for us to provide the adequate coverage for the beach,” Greenhalgh said.
The station will have three innovative features: a locker room with doors that can be moved to accommodate male and female staff depending on their ratio, a secondary watch area where lifeguards can take their breaks while sharing the same view as the main observation area one floor above, and video surveillance of the beach sending a 24-hour feed of footage to lifeguard headquarters in Quivira Basin and the police department. With the aid of cameras, lifeguards will be able to zoom in and out of a coverage area two miles long.
Additionally, the facility will contain an enhanced isolated observation tower; kitchen; first aid room with cots, showers and foot bath; offices for the district lieutenant and area supervisor; sleeping quarters for 24-hour staff; employee computer work space; garage for three response vehicles, personal water crafts, buoys and surfboards; laundry room; and space to train new guards.
The station should last 30 to 40 years and has enough capacity to accommodate a future staff of 43 to 45 individuals.
“It has pretty much everything and it will definitely be state-of-the-art,” Greenhalgh said.
The city project also includes a plaza featuring local artwork and a comfort station, or public restroom. Both the bathrooms and plaza are finished, while the main station slowly crawls toward completion.
In comparison, Tower23 ” a 44-room luxury hotel with a restaurant and underground parking ” began construction in January 2004, three months before the lifeguard station, and has been open for business since July 2005.
Players and Progress
The main players in this project are from the city and the contractor.
The Department of Engineering and Capital Projects plans, designs and constructs all city public improvement projects, such as libraries and fire stations. Assigned specifically to the lifeguard station are Jihad Sleiman, project manager on the engineering side, and Mike Feuersinger, senior construction manager on the administration side. Both engineers facilitated the project for the city.
Carl Castner is the senior project manager from EMS Construction, the Vista company hired to execute the project. In 2003, the $4.3-million Pacific Beach station was advertised for bids. There were no initial takers. After a little reworking, the city published a new and improved contract, which received a few offers. According to Feuersinger, the city accepts the lowest responsible bidder.
“There are contractors that are much better but they probably work for the private sector,” Feuersinger said of the system. “We take what we get.”
EMS broke ground in March 2004. The original city contract specified that EMS finish work by May 2005, or within 290 working days. During initial community meetings, Castner told residents and business owners that EMS would be done in nine months to one year, or by the end of January 2005 at the earliest.
That projection proved far too optimistic.
Problems started before EMS set foot on the property. Castner claims that the contract contained extra work not known to interested bidders, namely items that had to be addressed prior to the demolition of the original station. The demolition was initially set for April, but did not take place until July, Castner said. He would not elaborate further, as the specific conditions are included in a potential claim to be filed by EMS against the city.
Shortly after EMS began work on the station, the crew was asked to stop for about three weeks to allow a city utility undergrounding project in the area to wrap up.
Record rainfall late in 2004 further frustrated the situation by causing two to three months of delays, Sleiman said.
There were also errors and omissions in the architect’s drawings that had to be addressed as they were discovered. While this is a normal part of any project, Castner said the city imposed an excessive amount of changes on EMS. He estimates that the project was held up for 86 days on two changes alone: one for structural steel and another for plumbing.
According to Castner, the changes translated to extra work and extra time. Each flaw had to be submitted to the city project manager, who then requested information from the architect, Munroe and Orsa, Inc., who addressed the problem and returned new plans back down the chain of command.
“It took an insurmountable amount of time to get the answers,” Castner said. “There were probably more change orders on this job than I’d say I’ve done in 15 years.”
Feuersinger agreed that turnaround was not quick enough at times, but said that EMS was overextended due to a simultaneous city contract to build the College-Rolando Branch Library near San Diego State University.
Castner contends that EMS had more than 100 employees while working on both projects and denies that one affected the other. He said it is not uncommon for a contractor to work on eight projects concurrently and added that the library was completed last September ahead of schedule. To date, there is no city policy against accepting more than one city contract at a time.
But Feuersinger said the project was understaffed even after the library was completed. He claimed EMS retained a “bare bones” crew to finish the job once it was declared substantially complete, which is why it has dragged on.
By November 2005, the Engineering and Capital Projects Department felt it was time to review the station and create a “punch list” of last-minute changes and inconsistencies. It is standard practice to inspect the building as it nears completion, and the resulting list is usually short and addressed in a timely fashion. In fact, the city requires a contractor to finish the punch list (and project) within 20 days of its receipt.
To the city’s surprise, there were too many outstanding items in November for a punch list, even though EMS maintained that they were ready.
Two months later in January 2006, the city compiled the first list of 269 items. It included ” among many other things ” repainting of walls, adjusting and replacing lights and fixing the outside showers. Per city policy, EMS was expected to complete the list items promptly. They did not and on March 3 of this year, Feuersinger sent EMS a letter saying that they were out of compliance and had 11 days to finish the job.
“It should have taken them three weeks to finish the punch list, and it took them four or five months,” Feuersinger said, adding that it is still not done.
The city was slow to confirm the remaining items following the March 14 deadline ” it took almost two weeks to get staff on the premises. But over the course of four visits, they narrowed the punch list to 49 unfinished items.
Another letter was subsequently sent to Castner on April 5 saying that the city would pursue a deductive change order, or a credit for the incomplete work. According to Feuersinger, this is the easiest and least litigious way to get a contractor off of a project.
Feuersinger and Castner met on April 10 to discuss the remaining items ” the city maintained there were almost 50, while Castner said they were only six.
“There would be an item on the punch list that said, ‘This is incorrect’ and we’d have to address it in saying, ‘You issued us a change order to change that,'” Castner said.
Disagreement over the project’s status continued until April 17, when the city took possession of the site and barred EMS from the premises. Feuersinger admitted that the number of punch list items had decreased slightly. At press time, the list had fewer than 30 items.
“Even though EMS and Carl [Castner] state that [the items] are going to be done, they are not completed and he has stated in past occasions that they are completed and they are not complete, so we have to do something here,” Feuersinger said.
Ironically, the straw that broke the camel’s back had little to do with the punch list. According to Feuersinger, EMS badly botched the cement floors by sealing over stained areas twice. After complaints from the lifeguards, EMS added a layer of cementitious product on the second and third floors without city approval.
“That’s the point when the lifeguards said, ‘We didn’t like it before and we hate it now,'” Feuersinger said. EMS was subsequently asked to vacate the project.
The city has since recruited another contractor, T.B. Penick & Sons, Inc., to grind down the floors.
According to Alex Garcia, senior civil engineer and Sleiman’s supervisor, Penick will begin restoring the natural concrete finish as soon as they receive clearance from the city.
Penick will also do a thorough cleanup, replace the doors and add thresholds along the ground. Currently, the doors are flush against the floors, which allows water to seep in from outside. Thresholds were a contract specification that EMS did not complete and one of the larger punch list items that must be finished before the lifeguards take occupancy.
Garcia anticipates a completion date in early May. When the lifeguards are satisfied that the facility is in working order, they will move out of the trailer.
While the new contractor will attend to the major punch list items, the rest will be stricken from the record.
“Some of it may never get done ” we’ll take a credit for it,” Feuersinger said. He argues that this outcome is preferable to keeping EMS on the job. “This is really the best thing for everybody involved.”
Community Concerns
Ben Nicholls, executive director of local business organization Discover Pacific Beach, said that every establishment in the vicinity of the project was negatively impacted by it.
Nicholls claims that dust, fencing, construction equipment, vehicles and trailers were all deterrents to potential customers. He cited the closing of three businesses as proof: TD Hay’s Restaurant at 4315 Ocean Blvd., High Tide Café at 722 Grand Ave., and Taylor’s Restaurant and Breweries, 721 Grand Ave.
“The whole project just had for two years this air of disregard for the community,” Nicholls said.
This is in part due to a poorly executed effort to share information with residents and business owners. While EMS was required to provide a community liaison, the city did not specify that they hire a third party, nor was EMS compensated to do so. For these reasons, Castner appointed himself and juggled this responsibility with the more pressing concerns of the work site.
“He did a relatively poor job of it and we didn’t have enough clout in that specification to make him do anything different,” Feuersinger said, adding that for future projects the city will consider requiring an outside party to serve as the liaison and will send project updates by e-mail to residents.
The most vocal representative from the business community ” well known to Fueuersinger, Sleiman and Castner ” was Al Sessler of the Ocean Park Inn, 710 Grand Ave. Sessler claims that his business lost $18,000 from noise, street closures, damages to landscaping and blocked driveways. The calculation does not include losses incurred during the project’s first year, as they were anticipated.
“It was absolutely the worst nightmare I have ever seen in my life,” he said. “If the entire city runs like the engineer’s office does, no wonder the city is in the condition it’s in.”
As the project neared its second summer of construction, Sessler hired a lawyer to recover losses and speed up the project. While Sessler has yet to receive any compensation from the city, his lawyer was able to arrange a meeting with City Attorney Michael Aguirre and Department of Engineering and Capital Projects Director Patti Boekamp on Dec. 14, 2005.
Sessler and other neighboring business owners were assured that the project was in its final stages. Much to their frustration, the station remains unoccupied.
“I’ve just moved on from the project,” Nicholls said. “I think most people in the neighborhood “¦ sort of gave up.”
Loose Ends
The city is considering changes to its system as a result of the extended delays. The Engineering and Capital Projects Department is consolidating all of its projects into one source called CityWorks to avoid conflicts, such as the one that occurred between the station and utility undergrounding.
And though the project preceded Mayor Jerry Sanders, he too is evaluating efficiency in city contracting.
“We pulled the entire city together to find out how we do our contracting and found out that no one had a process that made any sense,” Sanders said. He added that the city needs to consolidate all contracting functions, require more specificity in contracts, thoroughly vet the contractors to make sure the best companies are selected and track their performance on the job.
Hindsight may be 20/20, but the city’s headache is far from over.
First, change orders need to be processed for the extra work tacked onto the project and work not completed. Dollar amounts for these items will be added or subtracted accordingly from the balance owed to EMS. Additionally, the city will assess liquidated damages, or a sum reflecting the days that EMS worked past the agreed completion date. This amount is still pending.
EMS and city staff must meet to go over claims and grievances held by both sides. Should negotiations arrive at an impasse, the two parties can opt for non-binding mediation. If that does not work, EMS could take their dispute to court.
Castner hinted that EMS might file a second claim against the city for misdirection and mismanagement. In 2005, EMS filed a $152,000 claim for design issues that caused delays. The city denied the first claim and will hold 10 percent of the project’s total cost until all claims are resolved or released, said Feuersinger.
EMS has also been banned from working on city projects for one year, although it is unlikely that the company will pursue another after this experience.
“We have no desire to do another City of San Diego project,” Castner said.