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Contractor seeks $446,337 more to complete Kinsman sewer project
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
You could write a book about the problems that have arisen since Trumbull County’s general contractor, Marucci and Gaffney of Youngstown, started to build the $10.6 million Kinsman sanitary sewer project a year ago.
In fact, Marucci and Gaffney nearly has written a book on it. It tells of finding undocumented storm sewers, petroleum-contaminated soil and delays pushing the project’s completion back more than five months.
The book the company submitted to county officials Jan. 22 also has a sad ending — a request for $446,337 more payment than the $6.8 million it is owed already.
The project, for which the county commissioners have approved six change orders totaling $955,209 so far, has had more challenges than any other sewer project Commissioner Frank Fuda can recall during his eight years of service as commissioner and 16 years as Niles councilman.
The project will provide sanitary sewers to 343 homes and businesses within a half-mile of Kinsman Center and the Farmdale area.
But Fuda said he still has confidence that Assistant Trumbull County Prosecutor Jim Brutz, the engineers with the county and Marucci and Gaffney will pull the project together and get it done by deadlines set by the government agencies providing grants to pay for most of it.
“I think it’s going to get done in a timely manner so we don’t lose any grant money,” Fuda said.
Marucci and Gaffney’s 24-page document, plus many more pages of supporting documentation, says the project will take more than five months longer than expected because of delays outside of Marucci and Gaffney’s control.
Among them are changes in work, additional work, failure of the county’s engineers to issue field orders in a timely manner, and design errors. The engineering firm working on the project is MS Consultants of Youngstown.
Marucci and Gaffney seeks $126,391 to pay the cost of providing a project superintendent and foreman, $80,425 to maintain traffic, $135,944 for the costs associated with the home-office support to the project, and other amounts.
“The Kinsman project is a project with a lot of unknowns because they didn’t keep a lot of records,” Fuda said of the people who built storm sewers along the route of the sanitary-sewer project and the people who left contaminated soil behind.
Where the storm sewers were found, they have to be replaced, increasing the cost.
Fuda said he remains confident that the challenges will be worked out because ms Consultants and Marucci and Gaffney “have done good projects in the past,” and the county has overcome challenges with other sewer projects.
Fuda said it should be pointed out that cost overruns on this project will not increase the cost to county sewer customers in other parts of the county; they only affect customers in the sewer district that serves the Kinsman area.