Kaplony
Palmetto State Deplorable
Posts: 25,393
Joined: Apr 2013
I Root For: Newberry
Location: SC
|
Flint Michigan back to it's usual ways
https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/05/flint...placement/
Quote:The company Flint, Michigan, hired to replace lead water pipes had no experience with the work, according to a councilwoman and a contractor, despite that the city has received more than $600 million in state and federal aid for its water crisis.
And the city ignored a model showing where lead pipes are and paid to dig up every yard, the vast majority of which had copper pipes, according to meeting minutes.
The city also prohibited contractors from using an efficient method of digging holes known as hydrovac excavation, Flint Councilwoman Eva Worthing told The Daily Caller News Foundation. That leveled the playing field for a contractor, WT Stevens, with no experience or the appropriate equipment — and let it bill far more to taxpayers, she says. All of these factors, she adds, needlessly led to more waiting for anyone who actually has lead pipes.
Quote:The city “chose to dig up yards that they knew were copper, and they decided to hand dig instead of hydrovac,” Worthing told TheDCNF. “That was because WT Stevens didn’t have the ability, and you get more money [digging by hand]. It costs $250 [to hydrovac] versus thousands” to dig a large hole without the equipment.
Quote:The city’s request for bids required that companies have relevant experience that WT Stevens lacked, the owner of a competitor, Ellis Monk, told TheDCNF. WT Stevens won by saying Monk’s experienced company, Michigan Monk, would serve as a subcontractor.
Monk told TheDCNF that Mays helped establish that arrangement. Monk said he tried to train WT Stevens’ staff and supervise them, but the water line work went poorly since they had no experience.
“They’re drilling every which way, junk flying everywhere. They didn’t realize what they’re doing to the structure of the house,” he told TheDCNF, saying the unskilled work could damage houses’ foundations. WT Stevens “hired people [with] no experience, some of them seemed like they were fresh out of jail.”
WT Stevens, which has received $22 million in contracts from Flint since 2016, didn’t pay him as promised and eventually cut him out of the deal, Monk alleges. A lawyer for WT Stevens denied wrongdoing but declined to elaborate, citing an ongoing lawsuit.
Mays has boasted about the money the city awarded to WT Stevens.
On April 27, Mays said: “We’ve taken in over $647 million. This is where the money is at. We’ve received about $167 million for pipe replacement.” He added that he’s “proud” that Flint “broke records for giving black folks money” through contracts, naming WT Stevens. The company is owned by Rhonda Grayer, a black woman and wife of a former NBA player.
When asked if WT Stevens had specialization in water line work prior to the Flint contract, Grayer said to TheDCNF: “Are you asking the other contractors that? We’re one of five.”
Quote:Equipment called hydrovac quickly drills holes and sucks out dirt. Unlike WT Stevens, Goyette Mechanical, the plumbing specialist involved in addressing the lead pipes early on, used such machinery and, also unlike WT Stevens, finished on time, Woodson said.
Goyette was ready to fix more lead pipes and asked for 500 more addresses, while WT Stevens still had a backlog. Woodson told TheDCNF that was the impetus for Gilcreast ordering the engineer to assign more addresses to WT Stevens even though the company still hadn’t finished its existing work.
Then the city banned all contractors from using hydrovac technology, forcing all companies to use the same technology as the one with no relevant experience, Woodson said.
Parks, the Goyette official, said, “After the bids went out they said you can’t use hydrovac, but you had do to it for the same price. We lost a lot of money on that. It’s the right technology to use, and we were using it in combination with excavators. We did the earlier work that way without issue.”
Mays told TheDCNF he personally was not against hydrovac, but that the mayor’s justification was that the more targeted, 18-inch “exploratory” holes could show a section of copper pipe without revealing that it was just a short splice on an otherwise lead line.
Woodson says this logic falls apart considering the prohibition was not only on using the technology to do “exploratory” holes, but also from using it to dig out large holes around lead pipes in order to replace them.
“So it was never about safety, it was about them making it easy because WT Stevens couldn’t keep up and Goyette was the only company with a hydrovac, so they were able to move the earth quicker and gobble up all the addresses,” Woodson added.
Dims being dims. The other companies must not have been willing to give anywhere near as big of a kickback as WT Stevens.
|
|
/
[NEWS] Flint Michigan back to it's usual ways
