expansion

By ROB SHAW | The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 20, 2011

For most of the day, Tampa Bay Water thought it had reached a $30 million settlement Monday over cracking issues at the regional reservoir. It was a decision that upset board members on the losing side because they knew it would mean higher bills for ratepayers.

Then, seven hours after issuing a news release about the 4-3 approval, the agency came out with a retraction. It turns out that agency rules require five of the nine members — two were absent Monday morning — to approve such a measure.

Oops.

Board members now will have to reconvene Oct. 17, and the approval is “conditional” until that time. An attorney for Pinellas County, and not Tampa Bay Water, discovered the error.

What remains to be seen is whether the vote on the issue at the C.W. Bill Young Regional Reservoir will change.

Mark Sharpe, who missed the session because he was attending a HART board meeting and didn’t realize a vote was being taken, said he would have voted for the settlement with HDR Engineering Inc., giving it enough votes to pass.

“I don’t see people changing their votes, unless there’s a massive citizen outcry,” said board member Neil Brickfield, who was one of the dissenters. “But I’ve seen stranger things happen.”

The proposed settlement means the lawsuit will go away, but $63 million of problems remain.

* * * * *

The $30 million settlement with the company that helped build the defective reservoir is way short of the expected repair cost, a total that will result in ratepayers paying the bulk of the price to fix it.

The offer left Sandy Murman livid.

It disappointed Susan Latvala, who called it flimsy and inadequate.

Sharpe, a Hillsborough County commissioner, compared it to the ugly process of sausage making.

When all was said and done, however, the directors of Tampa Bay Water seemingly had approved a $30 million settlement with HDR Engineering. At least for a few hours.

The move comes as the agency is in the process of planning to pay $100 million to fix cracking problems that it said were caused by faulty work by HDR and other companies which built the reservoir.

The huge gap between those two sums has many directors worried that water customers will be saddled with making up the difference.

“The ratepayers aren’t at fault,” said Murman, a county commissioner from Hillsborough. “We said all along HDR was at fault. But they’re getting away with $30 million. That’s not right.”

Latvala, a Pinellas County commissioner, agreed.

“I don’t think the settlement is enough,” she said. “I was very disappointed.

“It’s wrong what they did to us,” the Pinellas County commissioner said of HDR. “I think it should have gone to trial. And now the ratepayers are going to be left with the rest of that bill.”

Brickfield, also a Pinellas County commissioner, agreed.

“I didn’t vote for it because I thought it was short,” he said. “We have been told by the attorney what a great case we had.”

“This is just an ugly situation from start to finish. It was a poorly managed project,” Sharpe said. “It never should have been built the way it was in the first place.”

Karl Nurse, Ted Schrader, Ann Hildebrand and Bob Consavlo voted for the settlement.

Jerry Seeber, general manager of Tampa Bay Water, said the agency doesn’t want to get involved in a protracted and costly legal battle.

“I think it’s important for Tampa Bay Water to focus on getting the reservoir fixed,” Seeber said. “We all rely on that every day for the water we use.”

Tampa Bay Water filed a federal lawsuit in 2008 against HDR after cracking was found in the liner of the reservoir.

* * * * *

The trial was to have begun in July, but was delayed until this month. Under terms of the settlement, HDR admits no wrongdoing and must pay the sum within 30 days.

The $30 million settlement is the last piece of the litigation puzzle in the reservoir case. Last year, the agency settled with two other companies — one for $6 million and another for $750,000.

The settlement comes as Tampa Bay Water prepares to undertake a $162 million repair and expansion of the reservoir. Of that total, $100 million is to fix the cracking problem and $62 million is to expand it by 3 billion gallons.

Construction could begin in about a year.

Seeber said it’s too early to tell how much extra customers will have to pay to compensate for the difference between the nearly $37 million in recovered damages and the $100 million price tag for the fix.

Early estimates, he said, are that rates might increase from 10 cents to 15 cents per thousand gallons.

Legal costs alone have soared to $8 million related to the reservoir, according to Seeber. Half of that amount is just for expert witnesses.

By Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer
Posted: Aug 15, 2011 10:27 AM

CLEARWATER — Despite their misgivings about the impact on their rates, Tampa Bay Water’s board voted unanimously Monday to sign a $156 million contract to fix its cracked reservoir and expand it from 15.5 billion gallons to 18.5 billion gallons.

The construction work by a Nebraska-based firm, Kiewit Infrastructure Group, is now scheduled to begin late next summer, with completion in 2014. The work will require draining the reservoir and instead relying on the utility’s other water sources, such as the frequently troubled desalination plant, which produces the most expensive water in the regional system.

One board member, Hillsborough County Commissioner Sandy Murman, said she supported fixing the reservoir but worried about the impact on the rates. Tampa Bay Water provides wholesale water to utilities in Pinellas, Pasco and Hillsborough counties, which pass along any rate increase to their customers.

“We’ve had a series of bad results from big projects,” Murman said. “I want to cross all the T’s and dot all the i’s so we have a smooth landing on this. But I think we’re taking the cart before the horse.”

Murman said she worried about proceeding with the repairs of the reservoir before a trial next month of the utility’s lawsuit against HDR Engineering over the cause of the cracks. Tampa Bay Water contends HDR’s design of the reservoir was flawed, while HDR points the finger at the company that handled construction.

The utility’s finance director, Koni Cassini, told Murman that the worst-case scenario would require a 10 to 15 cents per 1,000 gallon rate hike — but if that happened, she said, she would spread the increase over several years to lessen the sting.

The board voted in June to raise its rates 3 cents a month per 1,000 gallons of water used, or just under a quarter for the typical user of 8,000 gallons a month. The increase is to cover the cost of running the desalination plant harder than usual during the two years when the reservoir is being repaired. That will require spending more on power and chemicals for the desal plant.

In addition to the $156 million for the repair and expansion, Tampa Bay Water is putting aside about $6 million to cover any unforeseen expenses during work, which is expected to be completed in 2014.

In addition to hoping to recoup some of the costs of the work from its lawsuit against HDR, Tampa Bay Water’s board is asking the Southwest Florida Water Management District to cover half the cost. But that state agency is facing a 36 percent budget cut mandated by Gov. Rick Scott and the state Legislature.

The utility opened the $144 million C.W. Bill Young Regional Reservoir in June 2005 to store water skimmed from the Alafia River, Hillsborough River and Tampa Bypass Canal. The reservoir, named for the longtime congressman from Pinellas County, covers about 1,100 acres in Hillsborough County.

The reservoir’s walls consist of an earthen embankment as wide as a football field at its base, averaging about 50 feet high. An impermeable membrane buried in the embankment prevents leaks.

The embankment’s top layer, a mixture of soil and cement to prevent erosion, began cracking in December 2006. Some cracks were up to 400 feet long and up to 15½ inches deep. Workers patched the cracks, but the patches didn’t last.

An investigation found water is getting trapped between the soil-cement lining and the membrane. As long as the reservoir is full, the trapped water remains stable. When the utility draws down the reservoir, though, pressure increases on trapped water in some areas, producing cracks and soil erosion.

The cracks have not been deemed a safety hazard to the structure, but utility officials say if they don’t fix their underlying cause then conditions could get worse. But HDR officials contend the problem is not that serious, and could be solved with a simple monitoring and maintenance program that would cost less than $1 million a year.

Kiewit’s proposal called for digging out and replacing the soil cement and the membrane beneath it. The reason, Kiewit’s design manager, Trent Dreese, said earlier this year is that they believe the cracks showed a weakening of the reservoir wall and “additional failures are likely during drawdown” of the water for the repair.

As for the expansion, Kennedy said the only change that would be visible was that the walls would be about 10 feet higher.

Sandy Murman

Tampa Bay Water agrees to $156 million contract to fix reservoir