City of Libby, state disagree over blame for sidewalk snafu

Letters Libby officials sent to the state expressing displeasure at the outcome of a state-funded sidewalk construction project garnered responses those officials say came up as short as the outcome that upsets them.

The City of Libby, in conjunction with Lincoln County and Libby School District, originally intended to make Balsam Street safer for students walking along the street from Main Avenue to Libby Elementary School, a distance of about seven blocks.

When the project was completed last August — about three years after the state awarded a grant to help pay for it — the safety enhancements extended only two blocks. The outcome didn’t catch officials by surprise, for by then they knew to expect it, but seeing the result only enflamed their frustration.

In a letter dated Oct. 18, 2017 and addressed to Mike Tooley, director of the Montana Department of Transportation, Libby Mayor Brent Teske outlined those frustrations, including a delayed initial scoping meeting, the state taking control of engineering, and the lack of local contractors being employed.

Another point of contention Teske raised was the city being charged $57,000 in additional engineering fees for a paving project that “should not have made the project engineering obsolete,” a project for which the city recommended a mitigation plan that the state didn’t support yet “largely implemented … when it got to construction.”

Teske also noted a June 2016 letter then-Mayor Doug Roll sent to the Department of Transportation, asking it to keep the costs to the originally agreed upon amount and to which the department responded by “reducing seven blocks of safe pedestrian route for children to two blocks to nowhere.”

“How your department can justify this effort as being compatible with your mission or the purpose of the Transportation Alternative Program is beyond comprehension,” Teske wrote.

The grant was under the Transportation Alternative Program, a part of MAP-21, or Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century, which consolidated a number of previously separately funded transportation projects into one source of funding.

“This letter serves as an invitation to the State of Montana to correct a wrong that was perpetrated by your agency,” Teske concluded.

In a letter of response dated Nov. 7, 2017, Tooley offered a partial explanation. The delay in scoping, for example, was due to the time needed for the Transportation Commission to officially approve the awarded projects, he wrote. He did not say why the state didn’t allow the city to oversee the engineering or why local contractors weren’t employed.

Tooley maintained the state’s position that the city’s paving within the project area “had grave consequences” to the project, as it “drastically affected the curb and gutter grades” in a way that, “combined with the strict tolerances of (the Americans with Disabilities Act), imposed a fairly extensive redesign.”

“We forewarned them that we were going to pave that street,” City Administrator Jim Hammons said in July, adding that the city has “just a small window” of time every year to pave and that he had “talked to two or three different engineering firms that said all they (MDT) had to do is change the elevations to match” what the city was doing.

Tooley wrote that the state “does accept some responsibility” for underestimating costs because “in this round of TA funding, (we) had no history of what engineering costs were going to be for projects of this nature.”

The state had advised applicants to estimate 10 percent for preliminary engineering costs and eight percent for construction engineering, Tooley wrote, only to eventually discover that “those costs have been closer” to 30 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

“The reply from the State is about what I expected,” Teske said via email Thursday. “I knew that they would not take responsibility for dragging the project out for four years or inflating the engineering costs to the point where we had no choice but to accept what they were willing to do, for what we could afford to match.”

The alternative the city faced, Teske wrote, was “scrapping the project and paying more than our match to cover costs already incurred.”

Superintendent Craig Barringer said he received “a very similar” response to a letter he wrote, while County Administrator Darren Coldwell said the county did not send a letter.

Tooley closed his letter recommending that the city apply for the next round of grants later this year to complete the rest of the sidewalk project, something Teske said he doubts the city will do.

“We now have the engineering for the rest of the project and in discussion with the county feel that we can complete the remainder of the sidewalk over time, considerably cheaper per block than what the taxpayer were fleeced for the two blocks that we got,” he wrote.