Second in a series
Re “City in a Wrestling Match with Builder from the Bilodeau Era”
Reeling in shock two years ago last January from the mystifying night-after-New Year’s murder of city consultant Paul Bilodeau on the Fox Hills construction site of Fire Station No. 3, Public Works Director Charles Herbertson ordered a one-month shutdown.
“We notified the contractor we were going to stop the project,” Mr. Herbertson said. “
In theory, FEI Enterprises of Venice Boulevard should have been one-third of the way finished building the station.
Not close.
“In February 2009, we sent them notice we were going to start the project back up — in hopes they would complete the project,” Mr. Herbertson said.
“Originally, the station was to be completed in one year, starting in August 2008. FEI did not complete it in that time frame. In fact, they went way beyond that, two years beyond that.”
Since it was September 2010 before Fire Station 3 was finished, City Hall withheld portions of the promised payments because the project ran to three times longer than intended. FEI is suing for the estimated $400,000 it did not receive plus considerably more of the $5 million deal. The case is in arbitration.
Construction delays happen, Mr. Herbertson allowed. But….
“With projects like this, change orders occur, delays occur,” he said. “Typically, the completion date gets extended out for those reasons. Unforeseen conditions occur on the project. When there are delays, we give the contractor more time, which we did in this case.
“But that only extended the completion date out a few months. I can’t remember how long.
“In fact, we didn’t complete the project substantially until the end of 2009. We actually did not finish the project completely, where the Fire Dept. was able to occupy the building until last fall.”
Question: Why was the project two years late?
“We feel the project was not done properly or pursued diligently by the contractor,” FEI, where Gabriel Fedida is the actively, fully engaged and sometimes controversial CEO.
“In the end, it was completed and passed inspection,” Mr. Herbertson said. “But it was not completed by the contractor. What we did in, I believe March 2010, was terminate the contract with the contractor.
“We said, ‘You are done up to this point. We are going to delete from your contract everything you haven’t done. We are going to say you are done.’ After that, we terminated the contract and paid them for what they had done up to that point, deleting from their contract what they hadn’t done. We decided to take it on ourselves.
“We hired the sub-contractors ourselves and managed it through a construction manager, basically acting like the general contractor to complete the project.”
How much did FEI lose through termination of the agreement?
“We deleted around $70,000 of work,” Mr. Herbertson said. “But more impactful to them was over $300,000 in liquidated damages we withheld from the project. That means each day the project is late, the city can assess a penalty. We withheld that from the final payment as well as well as the aforementioned $70,000.”
(To be continued)
