The cost of Astoria’s combined Sewer Overflow project is
up by a little over 35 thousand dollars due to lack of fulfillment by
CenturyLink of franchise agreement requirements.
City Manager Paul Benoit told
the Astoria City Council that the cost overruns would be tracked separately to
better facilitate cost recovery
“Unlike all of the other utilities, Century Link has not done the work
necessary to ensure that their infrastructure is properly located, or that
their infrastructure is adjusted and moved to ensure that there are no project
delays. They really dropped the ball,
particularly when you look at what the other utilities have done.”
Benoit said officials are
working with City Attorney Blair Henningsgaard to submit a claim to the company
for full recovery of the additional costs.
Project Engineer Cindy Moore
said although city officials have been in constant communication with Century
Link since the start of the project in October of last year, none of the
asked-for information was provided.
“We don’t have specific information from them regarding their utilities,
so we rely on the franchise utilities to get up pothole information which means
depth of their utilities. We can assume
a typical depth for where they typically put their utilities but a lot of times
in Astoria
things aren’t typical. And in this case
we didn’t get any correspondence from Century Link. They made no effort to move their utilities
where there were conflicts and that is a requirement of a franchise utility
when a city project is coming through.
They basically have to get out of our way.”
She said the biggest problem
was a vault at 8th and Exchange containing old phone lines. She said the company is now cooperating with
the city to work around the problems and minimize further delays. (:48)
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