Council adds $430,000 for Florida Street project

Mobile City Council members Tuesday added more than $430,000 to the price tag of the Florida Street drainage project to cover extra costs incurred dealing with railroad tracks.

The change order put the total cost of the project at $7.5 million so far, city spokeswoman Barbara Drummond said.

The project has prompted a lawsuit against the city and exasperated business owners and politicians alike since it began more than two years ago.

"This has been a nightmare," City Council President Reggie Copeland said at Tuesday's council work session.

City engineer Nick Amberger said the most of the extra money is needed to pay for unforeseeable expenses related to doing work beneath the Canadian National Railway tracks that cross Florida Street near Emogene Street.

The railroad company required all the work to be done in a 16-hour period. The day the city and the railroad had agreed upon — Oct. 14 — was cold and rainy. But the date was intractable, Amberger said, so work began at 4 a.m.

CN Railway workers moved the tracks; then workers from the city's contractor, John G. Walton Construction Co., had to dig the hole, install the drainage culvert and patch things back up in about 12 hours, Amberger said. The railroad's workers then relaid the tracks and ran several tests to make sure it was safe for trains to resume running on them.

The tight schedule required the city to take on several extra costs, Amberger said. The city had to purchase a pre-cast drainage pipe instead of laying it in place with concrete, as it had been doing.

The city also had to compensate the railroad company for all the work it did, Amberger said.

Tuesday's change order did not address a delay in the project that came to light last week, when workers unexpectedly encountered a sewer pipe underground. Officials from the city and the Mobile Area Water and Sewer System want to replace and relocate the pipe, and are still

negotiating how the cost will be divvied up, Amberger said.

Amberger told council members that workers will clean up the construction site and open Florida Street to traffic sometime around Nov. 14, in time for the holiday shopping season.

But after Jan. 1, he said, workers will close off the street again to finish work on the sewer line.

Once that is finished, there will still be one more phase of the drainage project remaining — to complete the culvert north to Dauphin Street. But Amberger said no funding is available for that leg right now, so he does not know when it would begin. The Florida Street drainage project — which entails replacing a pipe with a large culvert that goes downhill from Dauphin Street to Woodcock Creek — has been planned for more than 20 years. Work finally began in June 2007.

By the fall, business owners along the road began to complain about how long the project was taking. City leaders met with some of the owners, and the city put up blue signs around the neighborhood saying that even though the road was closed, the businesses were open.

Despite that, 10 business owners along the corridor sued the city and the construction company in February 2008, alleging that the project was taking too long, damaging property and isolating them from customers.