Paving causes headache for council

The 220 feet of asbestos pipe along the west end of the Powder River Water Project that had to be replaced outside of the funding provided for said project was recovered with asphalt at the completion of Phase 1, leaving the street along the east side of the block dressed in asphalt instead of concrete.

This was the topic of discussion at last Tuesday night’s meeting of the council in Moorcroft. With the submission to the Moorcroft Town Council of a change order that included paving for where the contractor added the water line. Councilman Ben Glenn and Heath Turbiville of HDR Engineering talked about the need of all parties to pay particular attention to these details so that, in the future, a change order will not be necessary.

Glenn asked in reference to the asbestos pipe that had not been figured into the cost of the project, “Why did this happen? How come we did not know that the pipe wasn’t what we wanted? We paid probably double what it would have cost if we had known. Then we would have had a concrete street.”

Turbiville reminded the council of the “conversations” had among all parties about the situation: “During design, it had been brought up several time as far as whether that section needed to be completed and it was stated by town personnel that they thought that was already in PVC.” With this assurance, Turbiville explained to the governing body that they did not test to confirm.

Glenn shared his disappointment that that one small stretch of roadway “is going to look that way for the rest of my life. It will be a black top street in the middle of concrete. I feel like I’ve failed the town because that will be there until I’m dead.”

“That’s part of the reason I recommended waiting to install that until we had the next phase,” Turbiville said. “So we could concrete that.”

While acknowledging Turbiville’s accurate recommendation at the time, Glenn explained their advocating covering the line immediately: “We don’t know if that next phase is tomorrow or in ten years.”

Both men accepted some responsibility for the debacle, “I’m going to own some of the blame,” Glenn admitted, “because I probably wasn’t as active in the conversations as maybe I should’ve been.” In turn, Turbiville returned, “I’ll take responsibility for that too, I was in those discussion and we should have looked at it closer than we did.”

With that said, Glenn commended the contractor, Hot Iron on their work, “I think the project is amazing. I think Hot Iron has done the town a great job and so has HDR.”