[Mintwood-place] Foxes and the Hen-house

[WeaverANC at aol.com]

Councilmember Carol Schwartz 
DC Council Committee on Public Works, Chair
1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Suite 105
Washington, D.C. 20004


October 14, 2003
VIA MAIL and E-mail

Councilwoman Schwartz:

I am writing to you today on behalf of my constituents in Adams Morgan, who 
have endured a year long battle with District of Columbia's Department of 
Transportation. I would be interested in setting up a meeting with you and your 
staff, to discuss these this issue more in-depth. 

During my brief term as an ANC Commissioner in Adams Morgan my SMD has been 
plagued with continual errors, missteps and shots off the mark by DDOT, 
including:

· Despite several calls to DDOT Biltmore Street NW had dangerous limb damage 
to large trees that went unchecked before and after the hurricane which added 
to power outages and property damage on the street; 
· Businesses with legal permitted sidewalk cafes were sighted by DDOT as 
illegal, due to DDOT's own internal problems with paper work. Moreover these cafes 
were used as a backdrop for a DDOT press conference about illegal cafe 
crackdowns; 
· DDOT 's two-year delay in the construction of traffic islands at 18th & 
Columbia and Calvert & Adams Mill has cost Adams Morgan a substantial art grant.  
 

But hands down the most egregious errors committed by DDOT have been on the 
Mintwood Place reconstruction project. Almost a year ago DDOT assured me that 
the resurfacing project and replacing of streetlights on Mintwood Place would 
take two weeks. In the year since the project has been a perfect case study in 
the District's incompetence.  

DDOT's contractor Lane Construction and its subcontractors have been 
responsible for several miss-cues that have caused great grief to the residents of 
Mintwood Place--- broken front steps, streetlights that were never hooked up, 
flooded basements, backed-up sewage into homes, paved over sewer traps, gas and 
water line ruptures.

This project is deregulation gone amok, as apparently the District has 
privatized some or all of DDOT's inspection work. Authority over this project has 
been passed to contractors, with a lack of coordination among the government 
offices and a strict compartmentalization of functions. This dissemination of 
authority explains some of the problems with the Mintwood project. But 
unfortunately it also means that the people with whom we have been talking with at DDOT 
have little to do with the actual Mintwood project and therefore could not 
answer our questions. Nowhere has DDOT kept a master list or paper trail of all 
of Mintwood Place's complaints about errors and shoddy workmanship done by Lane 
Construction. (Not, until residents created a email group, which included 
several DDOT senior staff --- even now there is still no master-list of problems 
on the street.) 

The inspection work on the Mintwood Place project (and all the Ward 1 
projects) is done by KCI Technologies, a Baltimore-based engineering firm with a 
large contract with the District to "inspect" District road projects. A big part 
of the inspection process is to confirm how many of each of the items covered 
by the contract were installed on a given day (i.e. the number of light poles 
installed, the tons of concrete poured, the square feet of brick laid). These 
sheets contain little information about the problems encountered on Mintwood 
Place, instead focusing primarily on quantifying the work completed by the 
contractor on the day in question. Information that is used to calculate how much 
should be paid to Lane for its work. 

KCI Technologies could earn as much as $1.5 million for its inspection work 
on the $11.5 million for the Ward 1 projects. There are only 3 KCI inspectors 
who handle all the inspection work on Lane's Ward 1 contract. What we need is 
inspection's to come from the District Government and not from a contractor who 
has a finical interest for the work to be finished quickly  --- quality be 
damned. This is a classic case of the foxes watching the hen house. I think the 
district could hire three inspectors to monitor Ward 1 projects for 
substantially less than 1.5 million, and they would be inspectors for the citizenry not 
partners with bid-winning contractors.

The greatest concern of our residents is that the contractor appears to be in 
violation of Davis-Bacon regulations, paying workers at a lower rate than 
District law requires. Nowhere on Mintwood is a posting of the wage scale as is 
required by DC law. Most residents doubt the workers on this project are being 
paid in accordance with Davis-Bacon rules. A central question is whether the 
workers have been properly classified or whether they have been assigned to 
lower-paying job classifications, which do not accurately reflect the work 
actually being performed by these workers. But without DC oversight on the ground it 
is impossible for us to get a true read on pay rates and classifications. 

Community involvement, on the front end, for a project of this magnitude is a 
must. We have not been able to find out much about the process which resulted 
in the selection of Mintwood Place for construction work or the process which 
resulted in the specification of improvements to be made to Mintwood. 
Speaking generally, it seemed to me that residents of the street should have been 
notified at some point early in the planning phase of the process so that we 
could have had an opportunity to provide feedback.

Many people, like Karyn Good, at DDOT have been extremely helpful in 
responding to  our catalog of complaints and concerns. But if this had been any other 
street in Adams Morgan --- without a collection of grassroots activists --- 
many of the problems of this project would not have come into the light of day. 
I look forward to speaking with your office on when we can set up a meeting. I 
will follow up next week with a phone call to your office, regarding this 
important issue. I believe your committee needs to hold hearings on the bid 
process and moreover why the city has relinquished day to day oversight to 
contractors who have a financial interest in the project and not to the District.

Thank you, for you timely attention,



Bryan Weaver, 
ANC Commissioner 1C03 

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