ALC-Highway Commission Review and Advisory Subcommittee
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Linda. So I think each of you have the Exhibit B at your desk, which is just an update on where we are with Guidehouse. And so we'll kick things off there. And if you guys can just recognize yourself for the committee and go ahead and get started. And members, we want to be courteous and timely on questions, but at the same time, you can just kind of hold off best you can. If you get to a point you have to have one and don't think you can move forward, we'll accommodate that but let's let them kind of get through the presentation if you can make notes for the most
part and then we'll come back and then have just a good single round of questions if
Speaker 7
5:42
possible good afternoon chairs members I'm Erin Hutchins director for state and local government for Guidehouse hi
Sagar Gokhale
Unverified
5:49
good afternoon my name is Sagar Gokhale I'm a manager with Guidehouse just a little latency there so thanks for having us to allow us to provide this update on our
Speaker 11
6:06
review of the department of transportation what we plan to do today was discuss a number of things one just ground ourselves very quickly in the project
Sagar Gokhale
Unverified
6:15
scope and our timeline not only for the project, but also briefing. Talk a little bit about our update. Sorry. Okay, perfect. Is that better? Okay. Talk
Speaker 11
6:26
a little bit in terms of an update related to our approach. Then we wanted to lay the groundwork and provide some contextual information that's going to essentially
provide the basis for us discussing some of our findings, and then discuss some of the emerging themes from our review so far. We'll talk a little bit about next steps. We'll take questions and answers, and then we'll talk about the appendix. And in fact, we might go through the appendix just before we get to the Q&A portion. So to start off with very quickly, just again, wanted to ground ourselves in the project scope. The key objectives for our review of the department was to conduct an analysis of their processes and procedures with a specific focus on procurement,
projects, expenditures, and their appeals process. We want to identify some leading practices that help RDOT optimize its operations, and then identify operational and regulatory recommendations. So that's what we understood the key objectives to be. And then we have three sets of deliverables related to that. So specifically the project work plan, which we presented way back when in October of 2019, the current state assessment and initial opportunities. And so that's a draft set of initial findings, which we are crystallizing as we speak. And then ultimately, we're going to have
a final report that not only includes those current state findings, but also advances a number of recommendations and a high-level implementation roadmap. In terms of our timeline, right now we have it presented up here. We are coming towards the end of our current state assessment, so phase one. We've already completed phase zero, phase one, and now we're in the midst of phase to where we're starting to, again, crystallize our findings, but also then start advancing
and formulating our recommendations and implementation roadmap. In terms of our briefing timeline, what we anticipate, obviously today, we're going to provide some background information on the organizational structure of the department and the operating platform to sort of lay that groundwork when we discuss our current state findings. But we anticipate returning in March to share in a more concrete fashion our draft current state assessment and the specific findings there, as well as what we've learned from our initial practices, sorry, leading practices analysis.
And then in April, we anticipate returning to discuss, again, more concretely some of our future state recommendations and our high-level implementation roadmap. in terms of our
Speaker 14
9:02
approach before we start to lay the groundwork we just wanted to
Speaker 11
9:06
provide a little bit more information about the approach that we took for this particular review and again we laid this out in our in our proposal in our project work plan but again we talked about the different
the six different focus areas that we were going to through which we were going to review the Department of Transportation. But in terms of the groundwork that we've conducted so far, so we've conducted 64 interviews during four site visits with 86 people, and that was comprised of staff at the department across four branches, so at the central office across the four branches, which we're going to discuss, 18 divisions, three sections, and four districts. And we also spoke with representatives from the Federal Highway Administration and also a number of utility
companies as well. So in terms of groundwork and interviews, that's what we completed. We also reviewed over 1,100 documents and data files that the department provided to us to supplement our interviews with department staff and also Federal Highway Administration and utility operators. And that's all going to lead ultimately to this final report, and we're at this phase right now where we're generating and crystallizing our draft current state findings that again will lay the basis for our recommendations.
So that's been our approach so far and as it continues on into the future. Just wanted to put this up here again as a reminder in terms of our focus areas. These are the six areas that sort of comprise the lens in which we were reviewing the department. So in terms of key department functions, we were taking a look at portfolio planning. So how does the state identify its transportation needs, and then translate that into a set of projects upon which it executes?
We also wanted to take a look at procurement. That was one of the key objectives for this particular review. And so we wanted to understand the mechanisms through which the department actually secures materials, goods, and supplies to fulfill its key functions. And then we also wanted to take a look at their capital expenditures and maintenance and operations to understand how efficiently the department is, and what are the mechanisms through which the department is actually executing on its key functions, specifically as it relates to capital expenditures, maintenance, and operations.
But at the same time, we also needed to understand the operating platform for the department, and so we examined the organizational structure and people capabilities, and that sort of provides a human element to our review as well as the IT infrastructure as the department is moving in the direction of using more IT solutions to enable a number of efficiencies we wanted to make sure we understood what that landscape looked like and then as we start moving in the direction of advancing some recommendations we will start to integrate a more formalized review of
the rules and regulations that that govern the department and how they might be impacted by the recommendations that we
Speaker 7
12:06
identify. So as Sagar said we did a pretty thorough review of a number of materials as well as discussions with department staff and that's led us to the context that we're going to provide you in this next little little bit and really the idea here is to give you a bit of a deeper understanding of department operations so that as we come to the next phases of the project,
you will have the context you'll need to assess and understand the findings that we're delivering as well as the recommendations. And of course we can revisit that context later if we need
Speaker 11
12:46
to. Thank you, Erin. So first and foremost, we thought that in order for us to understand exactly how the department operates, it's really helpful in many cases to understand how the department is actually organized. And so at a very high level,
we wanted to highlight the fact that the department has or employs approximately 3,700 staff members. It has an operating budget, projected operating budget this fiscal year of about $425 million and 340 or 341 million is specifically dedicated to their operating expenses, which leaves about 84, a little over $84 million left over for federal match for the construction projects on which it wants to execute.
Now, these dollars represent state fund dollars because there's an additional approximately $60 million from the federal sources and other sources that support the operating expenses of the department, but we wanted to focus here specifically on the state funds. There's also approximately with Act I and Act 416 funds, somewhere around $180 to $200 million projected for this year to also support some of the projects as well. So we wanted to bring that
to your attention. But that being said, the department is organized at least at the central office level at 26 divisions and independent sections. They have 10 district offices, about 33 resident engineer offices, and 86 area offices. So all of that comprises the actual department itself. And I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about the org chart. It's a little bit hard to see on here, so I'm happy that you all have at least paper printouts, but I wanted to discuss the primary responsibilities and functions of the different branches.
So they're in blue, purple, gray. I think that's kind of a pink and then maybe a salmon color all the way on the right. It's a rose color. Okay, a rose color. And kind of go from left to right. So you understand some of the primary responsibilities of each of those branches because that will help all of us, I think, understand some of our findings and emerging themes when it comes to the actual operations of the department. So starting from the left, we have the planning branch. And that branch there is primarily focused on trying to understand what the state's transportation needs are, collecting the data that informs those state transportation needs, thinking through what the state's transportation investment strategy can look like,
and then translating that investment strategy into a set of projects through the State Transportation Improvement Program, the STIP, into a set of construction projects and multimodal transportation projects as well. There's some miscellaneous ones in there too. But translate that into an actual set of projects the department is going to execute on and then start some of the pre-construction activities as well through environmental and also I just want to make sure I have this.
and surveys. Moving to that purple group, that's your design branch, and they're primarily focused on creating those construction plan designs, providing some support and expertise to some local municipalities that need that throughout the state, but then also acquiring some of the right-of-way and utility relocations that's actually going to enable the construction once it starts. In the gray boxes, we have the operations branch, and they are primarily
focused on monitoring construction projects. So once a contractor is actually awarded a construction project, the construction division and then construction staff distributed across the state are responsible for monitoring those projects. And then also through the materials division, also responsible for monitoring and inspecting the quality or coordinating the inspection of the quality of materials and workmanship in which those contractors are actually executing those construction projects. And then ultimately, they're also responsible for
executing through those district offices and the maintenance staff there, executing on maintenance activities. Once we get to the rose-colored branch, that's the administration branch, and they essentially provide the operational backbone in many respects to the department, and that's specific to IT, budget and finance, HR, procurement in some respects, and we'll talk about that a little bit more, and also government relations. And then there are a number of independent sections all the way
to the right in salmon color. I'm assuming salmon color right there. And again, they fulfill a variety of functions. And for the purposes of our review, we spent most of our time examining just a number of them. So the alternative project delivery section, connecting Arkansas program section, internal audit and also legal. So one of our focus areas was on portfolio
planning and that was the first one and from our purposes in our viewpoint we focus specifically on the construction portfolio planning and also the maintenance activities portfolio planning as well. And from a construction standpoint you know what we found here and what we wanted to to articulate here is the fact that there appears to be a fairly structured approach from the department standpoint in terms of translating the department's investment strategy into a set of projects against which it's going to to execute. And so if we take a look at
this pyramid all the way on the right, I just wanted to walk through pretty quickly how the department actually approaches this process where they take their investment strategy and translate it into a set of projects. So it starts all the way at the bottom with three primary groups of documents. The first one is We Move Arkansas, which is the department's long-range intermodal transportation plan, and that defines the department's investment strategy. The department has, through that process, which is federally required, identified a system preservation
approach to the state's transportation investments. But just to be clear,
Speaker 6
19:15
the federal mandate is not for a system preservation approach. The federal mandate is for the actual intermodal plan. The approach itself is
Speaker 28
19:23
a determination of the department. That's correct. Just to be clear. It's at
Speaker 11
19:28
the discretion of the state. Right. Thank you. that's combined with an analysis of the needs of the actual state the transportation needs of the state and so in 2016 the department conducted a need study but there are a number of other
studies that inform that it's not just limited to that that particular need study and they also take into account the projected funding not only from the state but also from the federal government as well because that's going to play a role and and not only the projected funding but how they potentially want to allocate that. And again, based on the, you know, we move Arkansas approach or the transportation investment approach that they identify through that, the department is looking to allocate about 80% of the STIP funding to system preservation, about 20% to capital
improvements. And so that's the approach that they're taking moving forward.
Speaker 7
20:22
Once they've identified the needs and... Sorry, let's talk a little bit about system preservation versus capital improvement versus maintenance so system preservation is you know repaving roadways doing enhancements to bridges but not necessarily large capacity increase type projects that goes into the capital projects bucket for lack of a better description and then maintenance itself is
things like mowing smaller roadway patching and sealing those kinds of things so there's three buckets that we're kind of talking about in terms of the
Speaker 34
21:02
actual roadway maintenance and construction activities capital projects those big new bridges new roadways capacity improvements system preservation keeping the things that we have working well and providing enhancements to
those but again not substantial new construction and then maintenance thank you so once
Speaker 11
21:27
the the state is sort of set or the department is set the strategy its needs how much funding it has available then it translates that into identifying a set of candidate projects with a within a broad number of categories so pavement projects capacity improvement safety improvement bridge and then a number of other miscellaneous projects but there's a significant number there and so the department then has to take that and prioritize that and so moving up a
level they use a software application known as decision lens to provide some objectivity it has a set of parameters and benchmarks associated with it for them to take an initial pass and prioritize that pretty lengthy list but then they also weave in a level of professional judgment and so they look to a number of subject matter experts within the department not only within the planning department, but also at the district level to help inform that prioritization. And they also work with a number of metropolitan planning organizations as well. There's eight located
across the state, and those MPOs are federally required. And the projects that they identify and they prioritize are actually required by law to be included within the STIP without modification. So there is a systematic approach there to how they prioritize those projects. Once they have done that and taken a first pass, it goes through a number of reviews through leadership at the department, up through the director, up through the commissioners. And, you know, there's feedback at all of those levels, and those are generally incorporated.
But ultimately, the Highway Commission then approves it for public release and public input. And once that feedback has been gathered, it's also incorporated to the extent that the department actually does that. and then it is formally adopted and released after the Federal Highway Administration, which is the very top of the pyramid. Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Authority also approves that STIP as well. So there is a structured approach from a large capital expenditure, large construction project standpoint in how they identify and prioritize those projects
that they're ultimately going to execute on. On the maintenance side, in terms of those maintenance activities, which again are largely executed at three levels through the maintenance division at central office but then through the district offices and the area offices that planning starts off with a historical budget which essentially translates into this work performance computation analysis it basically says you know last year amongst a number of different maintenance activity codes so that could be you know you know surface patching to vegetation control to mowing to you know guardrail repair
it identifies, you know, how many person hours were expended, what resources were expended in terms of materials and supplies and equipment, and sort of boils it down to that level. And the maintenance division, along with all of the districts, then compile that into a new set of resources and person hours identified against those resource codes, but not necessarily a set of projects. There are a set of projects, though, on the other hand, like, you know, this fog ceiling program which is this chart kind of in the middle at the bottom that
identified a district level what projects they're actually going to to execute on and again that's that's largely at the district level but at the area level it's it's simply just a set of activities that for which they're going to execute against over the course of the year and what helps them sort of map that out is a historical activity schedule that identifies during what portions of the year roughly that district and area office staff should be executing on those specific activities. But in terms of the computation analysis it doesn't
necessarily translate into a specific set of
Speaker 39
25:22
projects. So the third focus area, we're
Speaker 11
25:25
going to come back to the second which is procurement, but the third focus area that we spent our time looking at was around expenditures and that really translated into how the department actually manages its projects and programs to essentially manage cost and schedule and ultimately budget.
And that happens through three lanes, two from a construction standpoint and then one through a maintenance standpoint. So on the construction side, we're going to talk about the two lanes up at the top. There's a number of pre-construction activities and then there's a number of construction activities. So from a pre-construction activity, once a STIP, the STIP has actually been identified the department is primarily responsible for essentially constructing the design plans securing all the environmental approvals the right-of-way and utility relocation then to put
that project out to bid and so the department has identified what's known as their in their terms their critical path for this set of activities and that involves design so so design survey to understand sort of the topography of the terrain around which that project is is going to be set roadway design and this is where you know department staff actually with the aid of some consultants actually construct those roadway construction plans and design plans then it at some point it goes to environmental review because in some instances environmental
approvals need to be secured in order for the construction project to proceed in the event that the department also needs to acquire right-of-way the right-of-way division is involved to help acquire that right-of-way and then in some instances there's also utility relocation involved and so that right-of-way division also helps work with the utility companies to ensure that those utilities are relocated appropriately and ideally before construction starts there might be some instances in which utility relocation is not necessary in which case that
activity is taken off the critical path right away is not required and so department doesn't have to go through that particular step but these from the department standpoint to the extent that they're required you have the department has to run through these particular steps within that life cycle in order to get that project to a point where they can actually let it and essentially put that out to bid for a contractor to bid on or a set of contractors to bid on generally well not generally, but the program management division within the planning branch is responsible for
monitoring the extent to which the planning and design branches are executing against this critical path. And they do that via process known as staff minutes, and they have 24, approximately 24 meetings every year to monitor progress on all of the projects identified in the STIP, especially the ones that are going through those pre-construction activities to understand where they stand. All those activities will funnel into about eight lettings per year in which the department then releases bids for those particular projects and then vendors actually bid on those
particular projects. Generally they advertise those about four weeks in advance, sometimes about eight weeks in advance. From that point, once program management ultimately recommends selection of a contractor. They award the contract, issue the notice to proceed. Then responsibility for those projects moves to the construction division and also the district and resident engineer offices. And at that point, the department moves from actually conducting
these activities to essentially monitoring the activities because the contractors are the ones that are supposed to be executing on these projects. So those construction monitoring activities, and we're in the middle lane here on this particular side, generally starts off with project setup where the construction, where the contractor, sorry, actually creates the project plans, and those are sent to the department. In some cases, they're electronic. In other cases, they are not, and it is the responsibility primarily of the resident engineers within the department to monitor progress against those project plans. There is ongoing monitoring that
generally happens on a daily basis. So sites are generally inspected on a daily basis by the resident engineers and their staff, and they are recording in what's known as daily work reports a number of things in terms of work completed, progress made, and also any pay items or materials that are actually utilized on-site as part of the construction project. And that information is tracked and managed through a number of tools. One of them is Site Manager, and the department's actually created some add-ons to Site Manager to help with that, for example, as it relates to
change orders, and Dock Express that are used to really manage that project workflow, the documentation, and the information that goes along with those construction projects. At the end of the day, at some level, the department is paying these contractors on a bi-weekly basis, so that information is absolutely critical in order to ensure that contractors are paid on a timely basis. So that's an overview and some context around how the department is managing these
construction projects, not only from a pre-construction standpoint, but from a construction monitoring standpoint. On the maintenance side of the house, the department is executing on maintenance activities really at three levels. One at the central office level through the maintenance division, but then again also through 10 district offices and 86 area offices, and they're about 17,000 miles that they need to perform maintenance activities. And they have approximately about a $222 million budget at least this year and about 2,300 staff members to provide that
particular support. So it's a significant portion of the department. And as they've gone through their quote-unquote portfolio planning, when they're managing their activities, they're managing to that work performance computation analysis where they're receiving monthly reports around how many person hours have they used, what supplies have they used, and taking a look at that historical activity schedule to indicate during these certain times of the month, this is when you should be mowing. They have a three times a year mowing schedule or at least window, and so they're also managing
to that as well. And at the area level, your area maintenance supervisors are required to submit a biweekly plan that identifies the activities that they're supposed to execute on and during that bi-weekly period. Finally, as it relates to procurement, that was the second large focus area and key department function that we were going to take a look at. Again, we just wanted to set the context here around really the four different channels under which the department procures goods and
services and, you know, also construction projects, for example. And so there's four specific channels. They procure construction projects, pre-construction engineering services, equipment supplies and goods, and some alternative construction services as well. And so I'm going to go through them sort of line by line. At the highest level, we've talked about this a little bit, but construction projects are primarily procured through the program management division in the planning branch. That mechanism or that procurement vehicle is governed by federal and
state, from our understanding, federal and state transportation laws. As it relates to the policy that the department has adopted, that essentially boils down to the fact that they are going to select the lowest responsible, sorry, lowest responsive pre-qualified bidder, assuming that that bid is aligned with the 2014 specification book. The specifications book or specs book essentially identifies the conditions and the specifications under which their contractors need to execute that project. And then finally, that policy, so the department's policies around
how it procures vendors for construction projects or contractors for construction projects, is ultimately reviewed and approved by the Federal Highway Administration. And from the data that we received from the department, we understand that between 2015 and 2018, the department actually accepted 970 completed projects representing about $2.8 billion in expenditures. So I just wanted to give you all sort of an idea as to the scope of the procurement in that particular channel.
The department does also, in that second row, procure pre-construction engineering services. So they might need some additional design services. They might need some support as it relates to the environmental reviews and approvals. And the consultant contracts division within RDOT is primarily responsible for that. Consultant contracts is in the design branch. Again, the governing law here is federal and state transportation law. Their procurement policy as it relates to that law is essentially a qualifications-based competitive procurement, and that policy is audited by the Federal Highway
Administration, and the last audit from our understanding happened in 2016. Now, consultant contracts doesn't necessarily drive that procurement. The individual divisions within the generally within the planning and design branch are driving that. Consultant contracts is helping them frame the procurement process in order for them to secure those services. Again, from the data that we received from the department, we understand that from about 2015 to 2019, RDOT spent about $100 million on professional engineering services, and that's related to
pre-construction activities. And then in 2015, again, during that same time period, about $44 million on operations support. So that translates into support that the operations department needed either in terms of construction monitoring or some miscellaneous maintenance activities. the third mechanism is procurement or level of procurement is through or for equipment supplies and goods and that is managed through the equipment and procurement division in the administration branch the governing law from what we understand is state transportation law
but as a matter of policy what we were able to identify and surface in our review is that the policy actually aligns to Arkansas state procurement law and the actual procurement again not necessarily driven through equipment and procurement but primarily driven through the districts and divisions from the data that we received from from the department from 2015 to 2019 again in terms of scope the department spent about a hundred and twenty two million dollars on small order purchases so purchases that are about twenty thousand
dollars or less for which the districts and divisions have significant discretion to procure those services.
Senator Bart Hester
Unverified
36:41
I don't want to be, you said they spent $122 million on $20,000
Speaker 11
36:48
or less non-bid items? So the districts and divisions may secure bids on that, but
Speaker 34
36:54
that's not necessarily required. Your question is,
Speaker 28
36:59
did they purchase $122 million worth of materials through, yes, through small order purchases, yes.
Sagar Gokhale
Unverified
37:05
Thanks. And then as it relates to competitive purchasing, the department spent about $98 million
Speaker 6
37:14
from 2016 to 2019. In which case we would be
Sagar Gokhale
Unverified
37:22
talking about a sealed bid sort of process. finally
Speaker 11
37:25
the department has started to pilot a number of alternative contracting methods to procure construction services and that's primarily driven through the alternative project delivery independence section again the governing laws federal and state transportation
laws and their procurement policies are really related to the different types of alternative contract methodologies or avenues that they're exploring, and so right now it's really the design-build approach, and so their policies are aligned to their design-build procurement policy. Again, the Federal Highway Administration authorizes those projects and also approves the procurement, and the big project that is running through this design-build and this alternative contracting method is the I-30 crossing project, and we understand phase one
is anticipated to cost about $600 million. okay so
Speaker 7
38:19
there's the groundwork a little bit of again contextual information for you as we move forward through the process we're going to share a couple of the themes that that we have identified as we've gone through this process themes that are going to lay the foundation for our findings and our recommendations these are by no means an exhaustive list of the findings and recommendations
that we'll be putting forward and also the entities that we've benchmarked against here or that we've used for resource and research purposes in for the the themes that are represented in this presentation again these are not an exhaustive list so we'll come back to you with additional information but we wanted to give you a little bit of a preview into what you can expect from future discussions and reports
Speaker 39
39:12
from us Thanks, Aaron. So the first emerging theme is that
Speaker 11
39:17
the governance structures that exist right
now and some cultural factors may limit the department's oversight and transparency. And this is really beyond sort of the department itself, the Highway Commission, and its staff, and more focused on other stakeholder groups beyond the commission, the staff, and the department's leadership itself. The second theme is that, at least from our findings and our review that revealed that, you know, they have a lack of enterprise approaches, and that lack of enterprise approaches
may inhibit the department's effectiveness as it relates to not only portfolio planning, but then when that translates over into project execution, managing those projects and specific expenditures as it relates to those projects. The third is that beyond measures of system conditions, so pavement condition for example, RDOT seems to lack key performance indicators that are going to guide strategic planning and operational effectiveness initiatives.
And then the last piece is, as we were taking a look at the HR, the people capabilities organizational structure in IT, is that their human capital and IT platforms are not sufficiently developed yet. They are maturing, but they're not sufficiently developed yet to meet, you know, current and future needs of the department. it. And on the right column, I just wanted to identify the fact that we are, as we are crystallizing our findings and then moving into our leading practices review, that we are looking
both nationally and regionally at DOTs and other organizations that have significant input and insight into the operations of departments of transportation. We're looking at a number of those organizations at the national and the regional level, and we just cited a number there, but that by no means is a formalized list of the DOTs and other organizations
Sagar Gokhale
Unverified
41:15
that we're going to take a look
Speaker 7
41:18
at. So just really quickly, again, next steps. We are, as we've said, getting to the
end of our current state assessment and our findings. We are in the middle of producing recommendations again against some of those entities that we have benchmarked against as shown on the previous slide as well as others and then just industry best practices that may or may not actually include dot's although certainly we're focused there we will be coming back in march to share findings from our current state assessment we're going to keep working on
those recommendations and bring back those future recommendations to you in April and onwards, because we know that you have a final report due in November, and so we'll be prepared to support
Speaker 53
42:10
that activity as we go forward. Thanks,
Speaker 11
42:15
Aaron. Before we move on to next steps, I just wanted to highlight a couple items in the appendix. So this particular slide here just provides a perspective on, from a construction standpoint, what that project lifecycle generally looks like
from a portfolio planning standpoint all the way through project management. So again, starts off with statewide needs, moves to portfolio planning, pre-construction, project letting, and construction. We've also identified the main purpose of each of those key steps as well as the divisions that are primarily responsible for executing on that. We're not going to talk about that at length. We just wanted to highlight that for you all. The second slide here is really an articulation of
instances in which for a construction project there might be changes to cost or schedule or budget and so we wanted to identify generally when what those qualifying reasons were and the approval and documentation that's maintained by the department as well. I'm not going to again talk about that at length, but just wanted to call that out. And then this last slide here provides sort of a further breakdown of the department's operating budget that we had
discussed a little bit earlier, but then provides some key observations there in terms of some of the other funding sources, how much is available for federal match and to support construction projects. What the anticipated, at least from what we understand, the anticipated federal obligation limit or cap is to fund STIP projects. So again, the department does receive federal funds, but that is generally capped from year to year. And then just to call out like we did before in terms
of identifying what amount from that operating budget is generally dedicated towards maintenance activity. So I wanted to call those three slides out in the appendix, but not necessarily spend time on those. All right. Thank you.
Just one quick question. All right. I have one quick question. Actually,
this may be for staff, maybe something that we can get you all to compile. So on the 10 districts, and that would be slide eight. And members, I think this is online,
so you can probably get a clear version that'll actually let you read the writing in these. Ours printed pretty rough. But on the 10 districts, if we could get, I mean, is there a further hierarchy inside that district? Maybe that could be broken down a little bit more just to kind of get, I just want to get my head wrapped around what the responsibilities are in those districts and, you know, who's responsible for what. I mean, I know you have a certain number of employees that are you know dedicated to operating certain machinery or whatever it may be if mowers you
have whatever but who all is in that and what all is their
Speaker 60
45:15
to be clear an accounting of the number and role type yeah exactly kind of like district personnel yes kind
of like we've done in some of the others because one thing I was that I've never really been clear on is on a like for instance a district engineer are they just over the maintenance portion or they're actually over the projects in each one of the districts that are you know the
capital outlay projects I got I'm just not I don't have a good I don't have a
good understanding of of that layout and then one thing I was just curious about because we've mentioned the maintenance i mean i guess the funding that's given for maintenance to each district by district would probably just be helpful to see and again that may be
something that's better we can have a conversation with staff if that's something we need to get or something that you all may already have at your fingertips so with
that members have any questions on the update
Senator Rice, and then I'll – Senator Stubblefield.
Senator Terry Rice
Unverified
46:19
Thank you, Mr. Chair. And this staff may can answer this, but I'll just address it and go from there. And I do welcome the review, appreciate your work on that. I'm pretty simple-minded. I'll tell you that because everybody here already knows it. I had an efficiency study done at my business years ago, and I just remember one thing of it. The guy was real adamant that I drop dealing with three banks
and move money out of town so that I'd make more interest on just after the check drafts, I'd make interest up to that day. And he could not understand me telling him I do business with about 40 people and their families that I'm in there every day. So that simplistic thing I'm just telling you, my concern is on this, before you come back with your recommendations,
is there a pre-recommendation reply from RDOT that you take in consideration because there are things done that are not always easily seen, justifications that can be made, and while recommendations always can have an outcome, good outcome, is are you getting, is it in your plan to get feedback
before you bring that final recommendation to us? the variables that I would describe them as that can be done to me is important for you to make even some of your what may be common sense done in other states needs to be looked at. Am I coming across where you're understanding? I understand.
Let me wrap it up by saying we have a very important issue one on the ballot in november i preach there's quite a bit i'm on a fair and transparent process and again i welcome you know the review and all the good stuff that can come out of it but i i hope that this process allows you to get feedback and explanation and i'll address that to the chairs too hope that's what
we all want so that we get a good
product in the end that the public's going to see.
I may touch on that first because I think it relates to, you
know, we've done various studies, whether it be on procurement, whether it be on DHS, whatever it may be, and, you know, there's a set of findings that come out from that, and, you know, in the past, I don't think it's been, you know, really up to us to dictate or allow the agency to dictate the response to
those findings. Now, obviously, if there's findings, RDOT disputes them, they're going to have the ability to be able to do that and kind of say, no, this isn't really how that works in our real world or whatever it may be.
But I also don't want to get into a situation to where we, you know, dumb down the findings, too. So there's a very good balance, one that I hope that we're able to achieve, you know, through the process. And I think all of us want, you know, to make sure that RDOT is operating as efficiently as possible, that there's been a second set of eyes. I think that that's something that's deserved. We're talking about public dollars. And, again, we'll do that prudently, and I don't think that there's any, you know, how those findings roll out.
I mean, RDOT will have the opportunity to respond to the findings and, you know, make comments and address their concerns or, you know, put it in a real-world situation that maybe was not thought of during the finding process, though they are in active discussion with RDOT on
Thank you. I appreciate you addressing that. We
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
50:32
have Senator Stubblefield. Do you recognize for a question? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, the 2020 RDOT budget is $341 million. And of
that, $110 million deals with leadership, administration, design, operations, capital outlay, and special.
Can you just real briefly go over what the leadership and the planning, what those entail? Do
Speaker 7
51:06
We're almost there. Yeah, we're almost there. So to be clear, the source for this document is predominantly from an operating budget file that we got from them, and it is broken out into those segments.
There is overlap within those segments into other things, but I'll let Sagar kind of walk you through the finer details and as much as we can. So, you know, we talked about capital projects, system preservation and maintenance. those aren't necessarily clearly delineated in planning and design etc but we can we can kind of talk you through those so and
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
51:45
i just want to make sure for example there's 23 million
Speaker 11
51:50
almost approximately in leadership so that that leadership and and independent sections isn't just strictly
leadership of the department um in the organizational chart and i'll bring that back up you'll recall on the very right side there was a number of independent sections so it also includes the staffing for those independent sections and their operating expenses so for example the alternative project delivery connecting arkansas program the legal division the equal opportunity dbe division state highway police so on and so so the leadership in those in those divisions as well and the staff and
Speaker 87
52:24
those divisions is included in this amount.
Speaker 34
52:28
So that salmon-colored bar on the org chart is essentially what's encapsulated in leadership. That's $23 million. What about
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
52:36
the special allotments? So the special allotments in those
Speaker 11
52:40
cases are related to, you know, contingencies, you know, snow and ice removal, things of that nature that I think from the department standpoint, I'll just take a look back at my notes just to make sure I'm speaking definitively on this. But from the department's standpoint, that they are carving out that money in the event that they have the budget then to actually dedicate to these items.
In some cases, they simply don't because they're exceeding their budget, in which case they might have to bring down their special allotments. But let me just take a quick look at my notes here to identify specifically what's included in there. Okay, so from special allotment, there's some building maintenance funds, approximately $1.6 million, facility construction, which is approximately $6.1 million, inclement weather reserve, $5 million, and then there's just a contingency amount as well. And then on the capital outlay side, they're including about approximately $18 million from road machinery and equipment, $400,000 for dozer management, about $7.2 million for computer equipment, about $1.3 million for IT equipment.
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
53:50
You said $400,000 for what? For dozer management. Dozer management? Specific type of equipment.
Speaker 39
53:57
Exactly. What is that? It's a specific type of equipment, I think.
Speaker 14
54:03
I don't know what a dozer is, but what do you do when you... Well, that level of granularity isn't identified there
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
54:10
specifically in the budget. Okay. We don't have that. Mr. Chairman, I'm done. That's fine. It's the proper time.
I have the issue. Okay. Okay. Members, do we have any other questions on the update from God House?
Any other questions? Okay. Members, one thing. Thank you all very much for the presentation
and time today. One thing we do need to have a brief discussion on, I don't think we're at a point that we'd be able to finalize anything today, but that's our timeline kind of moving forward. And really, we can't finalize because there still needs to be some discussion between staff, chairs, and Godhouse about exactly how that's going to play out. But we aren't on a pretty tight timeline as far as having to get something out ready legislatively or legislative wise.
and when our recommendations actually do I don't have that off the top of my head yeah in November so again on a pretty quick timeline to be able to get that done my understanding is is that in April there should be we should be close to having you know that report to be able to start discussing that means we're going to also need to work during the the session the upcoming session which we're going to have to ask permission to do that and so I have a motion that would allow us to do work and also want to set an expectation after we get rolling
again we may not uh we're not sure exactly on the process if we'll have an overall presentation if we're going to break it down into categories and have meetings on those categories uh findings and and recommendations we're still still in the working phase of that but i would expect that we will meet uh probably two times a month uh to be able to get our work done uh before november So just a heads up there. With that, I'd like to make a motion that we move that for the purpose of conducting its assigned study of the Arkansas Department of Transportation, the ALC Highway
Commission Review and Advisory Subcommittee be authorized to meet during the fiscal session and thereafter through the remainder of 2020 as often as necessary, including on dates outside the regular ALC week. We have a second. All
those in favor signify by saying aye. All those opposed? All right.
Motion's been adopted. And then, where are we?
Okay, that brings us to item C, and that's the report from
the Arkansas Highway Commission on the progress of each road construction project in excess of $10 million. dollars
if you could just recognize yourself for the committee and
Speaker 105
56:57
you're welcome to present good afternoon committee members thank you for having us you've been provided a copy of our projects in under construction in excess of 10 million dollars or more
I suppose pretty much we try to give you as much information as possible if there's something specific you have i may not be able to answer it today but i may have some
Speaker 106
57:18
of the information and i will try and if not we'll get back with you as soon as we can
members do we have any discussion on that report and is there anything that stands out to you that maybe we need to be married aware of in regards to any of the projects anything that's abnormal or outside the scope of normal
day-to-day work all right very good uh senator stubblefield i think you had a question it's probably i'm assuming that uh this is probably the right time thank you
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
57:50
mr chairman thank you mr rogers i noticed there's not anything on uh district six on any of these construction projects in west central arkansas other than over on sebastian county side but the question i have A couple of months ago, Director Bennett was in this meeting,
and I asked Director Bennett if he would send one of his engineers to Clarksville to meet with the superintendent to see about using some of the right-of-way they have. They've got about a mile and a quarter of right-of-way going down I-40 back west. And I asked him if he would send an engineer up there to work with the superintendent to see if any of that right-of-way would work in regard to the beautification act or the guidelines or the criteria that you have for putting up those signs
simply because it costs Clarksville about $240,000 to take those down. And they have other land that I think those signs would work. I asked him that two months ago. That never happened. Can you tell me why? I don't know the answer to that right now, what I can
Speaker 105
59:00
find out and get back with you. I would appreciate that. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman. All right, thank you. And any other questions? Yes, sir. Senator, you're recognized.
Speaker 114
59:14
On the second page by route, it's not in my district, but Jackson County, that thing was let in 2013, about midways in the page there. You'll have a summary progress
Speaker 105
59:27
sheet. If you look to the right, it'll have a page number that that summary
Speaker 116
59:31
progress sheet is on, if you can confirm me on that. I mean, yeah, it's whatever. I just, 2013, that's a long, I hadn't even flipped over there, but it's
2020. Senator, are you referring to White River, no? White River and Newport? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so page 40. I mean, that's a little outside the norm, isn't it? It's
Speaker 116
1:00:00
40. We, I don't know a whole lot of the details around that, Senator.
Speaker 105
1:00:32
I know that at the beginning of the project, they had, due to flooding, heavy rain fall, There were issues with the cofferdams being constructed appropriately, and they would have to go back, and they spent a lot of time rectifying that issue. I can find out some more information for you if you'd like. It is longer than originally suggested. It was originally estimated to be complete in late 2016.
Now it's going to be finished later this year. Unfortunately, I don't have full details on that. where they are as just
Speaker 116
1:01:10
one you know kind of stuck out there to
Speaker 127
1:01:13
me thanks yeah if you could uh just email uh staff
and then they can relay that on to senator johnson as far as an update do
we have any other questions on any of the projects representative do you have a question yes i appreciate mr chairman yes sir
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
1:01:31
you're recognized thank you so much sir uh gill
once this three cents passed through the legislature and we have our gas tax you know at the pump and then we have also our tax on that half cent that you know we voted on back in 2012 you know you have a certain amount of money that goes turn back to the cities and a certain amount you know that goes back to the counties but I just wonder what overall what we have now to spend on roads if you extract out the county part and the city part and i can find
that out for you and i appreciate it thank you sir thank you
representative one question kind of along those lines and i've
just i think read the article and maybe sure i don't i don't have a good understanding of it either so but you know we were in excess of what we thought was going to be transferred because the surplus being greater than we thought it would be right so to the highway department and it's my understanding there was a another account that was set up and I mean what what is how is that account to be used is it a special projects account is that the way I
understood it um and then if so
Speaker 105
1:02:47
meeting the commission uh set up a an economic development account our projects as you saw in the discussion from guide house we do planning extensively into the future and our funds are obligated pursuant to those plans so that when somebody has a situation in which they need immediate assistance, it's often difficult or impossible to provide that. Those funds are set aside. It was a plan that was put together, as I understand it,
in collaboration with the governor's office and the Arkansas Economic Development Commission to have funds available. It's a one-time transfer of $15 million to that based upon the additional revenue we received as part of the 25% of the general surplus. So there was $15 million
in addition to the surplus? I did not understand that. No, it's coming
Speaker 105
1:03:35
from the surplus of revenue, the money that we got this last time around, keeping in mind that it was a high year for the surplus.
Right, absolutely. So it was more than what we had anticipated or budgeted for match, and so we took that additional revenue and set it aside to be able to do economic development projects in the event that some of them are submitted and opportunities we've in the past have been approached for instance when they were trying to bring Big River Steel in with requests to do some additional work on roadways around that facility things of that nature just to provide flexibility to the department and to the commission to be able to respond to economic development
issues. Okay is there a way for us then I didn't realize that's how it was set up is there a way for us to then become aware of when those funds are expended or committed I guess really is probably what we want to know so maybe even in this meeting if you know part of that 15 million that's set aside in the special account if you've committed it you know let us know when it's committed to what project you know I'm sure then that'll lead to questions about you know how did you arrive at that designation that that project was a priority that sort of thing that way we're
on all kind of understanding because if the conversation was at the governor's office i can promise you it's not been had with the legislative side because it was that's news to us that it's news to me that that was part of an agreement
Speaker 105
1:05:07
so okay understandably and we'll yes we'll make an effort to include that in the report there may not be any yeah we don't know that this will be used at all for any of this in
the time that we're talking about before because i would say um back Back when we did the surplus transfer, and I was not a big advocate of this, but other
members that were, their focus was for maintenance. Those dollars that we were going to transfer were going to be used for maintenance. And this was- This is a little bit different than I think why ... I mean, I may be wrong, but I think that was the general overarching, if we're going to send more money over we want money be able to
be spent on maintenance and that this is not maintenance and i i can i can check into getting you an answer
Speaker 106
1:05:53
for that okay all right perfect all right do we have any other questions
all right seeing none uh thank you uh one thing we do have uh so there was a request by some parties that were involved or that are involved the white river bridge i-40 uh construction project in prairie county which by the way is in my my district but also impacts all of us is it's i-40 um just some issues that were happening there some of which were weather related
some of which related to the flooding and they wanted to kind of come and make a presentation on the standing where things were so with that um
the folks that are that are involved so i think you
have parsons and again i apologize i'm not sure who all is here Yeah.
Speaker 141
1:07:11
All right, so my understanding is there's been some, you know, kind of
back and, well, number one, there's a delay, you know, on the project. Some of that's just due
to, you know, issues that are beyond anyone's control. We've had historic flooding, other things here in the state, but then there are some other issues that, you know, kind of a discussion between your entity and, you know, the Department
of Transportation, I guess probably the best way to proceed at this point, and I'm sure RDOT's going to want to make some comments also, is if you all can just introduce
yourselves, let's kind of make a quick, good presentation, allow the members to, you know, to have some discussion, ask questions, and that sort of thing, and then, like I said, we'll just kind of determine
from there how to move forward. With that, if you can, if you plan on speaking, go ahead and introduce yourself. That way we're all on the recording here.
Yeah, just make sure you're lit green. Okay, very good.
Speaker 146
1:08:45
All right. We're live. Yeah, that's a better voice. Mr. Chairman, co-chairs and the committee, we appreciate the opportunity to be recognized. We, Parsons and C.J. Mahan, formed a joint
Speaker 149
1:08:55
venture to construct the White River Bridge for the state of Arkansas, and we're currently under contract with the Department of Transportation. We fully recognize the limitations this committee may have as it respects to the Department of Transportation,
but we think it's important to give you an update of the decision-making that's ongoing during this construction project. An incident occurred during the progress of the work. We're into plus three years of construction right now, and it was noted that we are delayed, and we continue to be delayed by flooding and this particular incident that we're here today to tell our story about. And so today we're going to, my associates are going to kind of overview
the project real quickly, briefly, tell you who we are, talk about the incident from a commercial and a technical standpoint, and what the relative impacts of the decisions going forward for us will be, because ultimately the dispute resolution process has us working through the department and ultimately back to the legislature and get in front of the claims commission. So ultimately we feel the decisions that are being
made today will impact how that claim gets presented at that day. So the first page of the presentation I kind of overview the project. Parsons is a construction and technical corporation that's worldwide we provide technical solutions both from a design standpoint as well as we're a top build top bridge builder and contractor we've also been named again in 2019 is the
Speaker 150
1:10:48
most ethical company in the world and we we enjoy that that honor here now for the last eight
Gary Answer
Unverified
1:11:01
years CJ Mahan good afternoon again my name is Gary answer I'm managing partner for CJ Mahan construction
Speaker 152
1:11:06
company we're a regional construction firm located out of Columbus Ohio I am a registered professional engineer in the state of Ohio I've been practicing for 37 years designing and building a variety of
Gary Answer
Unverified
1:11:20
some of the largest bridges in the eastern United States.
Speaker 154
1:11:27
So a little bit of background. You know, we talked about the project value is $100.6 million, and we were awarded the project. I got some pictures up on the screen. If you have your handouts, they're probably much easier to read. But in that left upper screen picture, there is a designation there with an arrow pointing to the pier cap and this is kind of our problem at hand right now that we're at a standstill right now with the department. I also draw your attention to the shoring towers to the right of that pier cap as well because
that will come into discussion here in a few minutes as well as the circle I have on the lower hand picture. Those are the additional beams we put on the pier cap in question due to safety concerns with the current flooding that's going on right now at White River. So the pier cap that we poured in August 23rd, during the pier cap pour, we experienced a lightning storm, which falls under the act of God provision within RDOT specification. It was an act of God.
I'd like to make a distinction between a lightning storm and a rainstorm. We could probably pour concrete in a down drizzle rain event we could protect the concrete we can't do that in a lightning storm for osha regulation as well as just protecting our people and being smart contractors we have a lot of cranes on site they're 150 ton lightning rods and they attract lightning so we have to get off of the pier caps when there's a lightning storm it's important to
mention that during the pour of that pier cap, we used a mixed design that contained a retarding agent in it. And for those of you who don't know what that means, it's a chemical admixture that we add to the concrete that slows the curing process down of the concrete to remove the initial set to beyond five hours. And that's part of our pre-planning process for instances just like this. We wanted to have that capability in case something like this did come up where we could go back to pouring the concrete again.
Those test results, we also have test results that support this information relating to the admixture. So three days after the pour, we got verbal notice during our owner's meeting that RDOT was not going to accept the cap. So just keep in mind that that was the first notification that we had that there was a problem on their side. We didn't have any texts the night of the pour. We didn't have any e-mails the night of the pour. We didn't have any phone calls the night of the pour that there was a concern with this.
Speaker 149
1:14:10
We found out three days later, okay? And just to note, when we got back up on the pour, we were able to put an initial set on top of that and vibrate. the new concrete into the old. We were able to work the concrete and create a more uniform porous sequence, just as if we were doing, as if we hadn't stopped. I'm sorry, go
Speaker 154
1:14:37
ahead. That's great. So when we got verbal notification that day, we went into motion with
providing structural analysis, engineering analysis, and we got our structural engineers on board and we started the process with providing the department information where we felt that there was no reason to reject this cap. So it's important to note that when the department did give us a rejection, it was September 4th, I believe, and that was from the resident engineer. We continued to go through the engineering analysis back and forth with the department
through the months of September and October and ultimately got a final rejection the end of November from the construction engineer so those are important dates to remember because we worked the problem we didn't stop working the problem we continued to work the problem so of all this engineering analysis that we provided RDOT the main responses we got back each and every time we submitted them something was a rejection remove and replace the cap at no cost to the department
so our current status right now is is the department just in the last week sent us a response letter again to a letter that mr. answer had forwarded to them with our final position of where we're at. And they're still of the opinion that the cap needs to be removed and replaced at no cost to the department. Our position right now is, again, this was an act of God.
And with that act of God, there's provisions within their specifications that allow compensation to us for this issue. Secondly, the directive to remove and replace the cap based on the engineering and testing data that we've provided the department we feel constitutes economic waste. And I'll leave it to that, and if you guys have questions with that, we can talk about that further. The project is currently shut down due to another high-water level event, which was the Army Corps of Engineers contributed to with the release of Bull Shoals in November,
as well as the current, I'm sure you're all aware of the current weather going on in Arkansas, and it's that time of year. It's just underwater. So why is that important? Well, if you look at the screen right now, and I've put a square around the shoring towers. Those shoring towers are actually supporting steel out in the middle of the river that is sitting on the previous pier. the both the bull shoals release as well as the weather are impacting those shoring towers and
they could collapse which is the reason why we tacked on the next span of beams to protect those beams because it's our responsibility to secure the site and the materials on the site so we take our job seriously so i'm going to skip ahead two slides and go back to slide five but i'm slide 6. I'm going to let Mr. Gastoni and Mr. McNary discuss a little bit about the engineering analysis and the testing we did.
Speaker 164
1:18:05
Vince? Sure. Mr. Chairman, committee members, I'll reintroduce
myself. Vincent Gastoni. I'm a practicing professional engineer. My focus, my discipline focus is bridge engineering. Started my career at California Department of Transportation 10 years there. Left as a senior bridge engineer. Been working with Parsons now for 19 years. I lead a group and team of engineers that provide engineering services to owners just like RDOT, like the engineer of record on this project in the design of structures and production of contract documents. Also provide owners construction inspection services to manage their construction projects for complex bridges mainly.
I also serve contractors as a designer on alternative project delivery projects, design-builds, such as you heard earlier you have here in Arkansas on I-30. So I work as a different division than our construction group. Again, my focus is design. It was brought to my attention, the issue on White River. Our construction group gave me a call. We often work together and share technical discussions. and they asked my opinion of the incident,
my opinion of the potential impact to the design, and that I review the current design and provide some commentary. That, I prepared my team to do so and provide some initial opinions that the condition that was surmised would be of little impact to the original basis of design used for the bridge. What followed then was a series of discussions between our group and the RDOT bridge office.
We met with them on September the 12th, had a vigorous discussion on the incident and the potential impacts to the bridge. Our initial analysis was very preliminary. In good engineering practice, we offered to provide additional analysis to compare notes to get into refined models and evaluate the potential impact of this to support my initial
recommendation that the issue was not detrimental to the original design. So we worked through, and that agreement was made, it was Mr. Rick Ellis and Mr. Kyle Urey of the bridge department that I work mainly with. We both agreed it would be best to work on an engineering technical level and avoid any contractual or construction discussion, and that we did. So there was a few weeks of back and forth, Parsons developed some refined analysis models
much deeper than we would use for traditional design and much deeper than what was used for the original design to demonstrate that this issue, this perceived issue, we were dealing with a lot of unknowns, to evaluate it. Since we were dealing with a lot of unknowns, we made a lot of very conservative, worst-case scenario, the world's coming to an end assumptions, so that we could... My reason I was agreeable to that, because I still believe, as I do now, that there's no issue to the original design intent.
So we took these issues, we analyzed them through current highway code. This is the AASHTO code, the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials, I'm sure you're all aware of, which is supported by all 50 states and the Federal Highway Administration. We used that code as the basis of acceptance and analysis. The analysis went far beyond that code. That code is developed for traditional design methods. It's not academically rigorous, it's not an absolute, it is meant to provide practicing engineers a guide for efficient design.
But we drilled down, so to speak. Through that process and back and forth with RDOT, they engaged their engineer of record, we traded commentary back and forth on our respective analysis, and we eventually came to the conclusion that as far as the strength design of this, given the worst case scenario for this condition that was perceived of a construction joint in the pier, that the basic strength parameters of code were met. The unresolved issues then were the non-code issues of durability and resiliency and so
on, which could not be answered directly by code. And just so everyone understands, and I'm sorry for my enthusiasm for design, but this is what I do, but code has a lot of standards and criteria in it, and some of them are based on strength. That's the stuff that's going to break and we're concerned about. Some of them are based on durability and constructability. There are code minimums to cover that. Minimum amounts of rebar, minimum sizes of concrete elements. Same for steel structures. So a lot of times we run into elements in design that are designed by minimums and not
controlled by strength. And the reason I mention that is I just want to make clear that not every Every element of every bridge is controlled to it, is designed to its absolute limit. There are very few elements that are designed to their limit. Everything else tends to be controlled by these code criteria, which is good practice for good ductile design. Through this process, RDOT's engineer of record, Jacob's engineer, I believe, we traded refined
analysis and and for my opinion they concurred that the strength condition was was met and we had this durability issue to resolve which right frankly cannot be cannot be resolved by engineering analysis as part of that process and then good engineering practice we solicited a third party independent reviewer of Parsons calculations recognizing the significance of the recommendation we were putting forward that was McNary Bergeron, who's at the other end of the table,
who will speak shortly, to review our calculations, do the checks on top of our checks. And again, our calculations were essentially in line with, ultimately, with Jacob's calculations, each of us coming at it from a different way. And at the end of that, the final evaluation still was the CAP meets current interstate highway code. But at
Speaker 172
1:24:39
that point, the engineering analysis was pretty much as far as we could take it.
Speaker 164
1:24:46
Shortly after that, well, then we had a quick discussion on other things we could be doing to satisfy durability concerns. In the meantime, some non-destructive testing was performed on the cap. So this is basically what we did to the cap. And this is industry standards for testing in place concrete. We use it a lot. Construction is not a perfect art out there. Other things happen, but we have to use, you know, we need methods to evaluate the in-place works to determine acceptability.
Speaker 172
1:25:19
And for this, and what you see up there was our, this was the SASW, Spectral Analysis Surface Wave. Frankly, it's concrete radar
Speaker 164
1:25:29
using sonic waves. From this, we shoot sonic waves through the concrete. We get returns. Concrete's dense. We get good returns. Concrete isn't dense. There's a gap. there's a there's a there's a slip plane we get different returns so this is the analysis we performed and if you if you recall my earlier statement is is when
we initially entered into the design with RDOT we agreed to the most conservative analysis parameters into the world parameters we can come up with by code to and and checked this analysis came in after and what this analysis represents is here is green green represents the original design intent for both design and construction fully complete monolithic solid concrete the yellow dots you see there indicate there's some there's something in the concrete small honeycomb a small pocket maybe a small small plane very localized
this is considered fair condition this would be considered mid-level mid-level in the ash toe specifications for this criteria we used poor conditions would be the conditions we assumed for the actual analysis, those are red, and you'll notice there's no red on the slide. We did not update our calculations to represent the improved conditions, which would increase the capacity side calculations of our analysis. There was no need at this point. We were beyond that, but this information stands. There was one
small discussion of, you know, what could be done, and I get into these discussions with owners all the time what could be done in case there is a problem for what we what we don't know at the bottom of the slide you'll see there's some conditions there so at these at the at the poor placement layer where this layers important maybe wasn't explained but when they place a cap it's we're 10 foot tall and eight and a half foot wide that's a huge amount of concrete to place and it takes about 90 minutes to place 18 inches of concrete across the
whole cap, then you come back and do it again and do that about six times. It takes, there's my notes here just for reference, takes about 10 trucks. Each truck carries a nine-yard load. It takes 10 trucks to do one 18-inch layer. This is why we had five-hour retarder in the concrete so that when we get back to the other start of this, the concrete is still fresh and workable with a cushion in there in case things happen as they do. And I will note that this was Pier 1.
Pier 2 was placed months before. Same pier, same dimensions, successfully placed by the team through the same planning and process. So as a design engineer, these are the specifications and criteria that we get into when we do oversight for owners for their field works as well. So I just wanted to bring that up. So there were
Speaker 172
1:28:23
some discussions on what else could be done. I provided some recommendations for our final meeting with RDOT on November the 6th or in
Speaker 164
1:28:32
response to that meeting of November
the 6th of things that could be done such as just seal the cap in case at that poor layer water could get could intrude on that layer although this cap is up in the air and under the bridge deck so it's really not very exposed. Also there's things we have in there to retrofit structures such as carbon fiber wrap. We could put post-tensioning bars to add strength to the cap. But, of course, as I said earlier, none of these were required because we met strength requirements.
Speaker 172
1:29:04
So that was a summary of the engineering analysis that went on in this. And I went way on way too long, way farther than I wanted to. But if you have any questions,
Speaker 164
1:29:16
happy to answer them now. And I did want to then turn over the microphone to Mr. McNary to discuss the third-party review of our
Speaker 177
1:29:26
work. All right. I'm Scott McNary, and I'm a founding partner of McNary Bergeron and Associates, and I'm an expert in concrete.
I've been designing and building concrete structures, heavy highway concrete structures for 35 years. the jv brought me on as an independent to take a look at the cap to take a look at the calculations and give them my professional opinion what i saw so i've been along in this process through events i'm not going to get into the technical details other than to say i've reviewed the parsons and jacobs work every step of the way i concur with it they made some incredibly conservative
assumptions and still showed that the cap was okay and the the sonic testing the non-destructive testing in fact bears out the fact that that is a monolithic cap we have out there so our basic conclusion here and this is my professional opinion is that this cap is safe with no compromise and it's sound it is designed per AASHTO and we see no reason that this cap
should be torn out and replaced and in fact we believe that the process of tearing this cap out and replacing it would serve no purpose other than to damage perhaps do more damage and is there right now. So this is the basic conclusion we've come to. And again, if you have more questions, I kept it brief and stayed with my conclusions. Thanks.
Speaker 178
1:31:12
Sir, you recognize for a question. Thank you. Quick question on that. So the monolithic determination
Speaker 179
1:31:19
that you came up with after the pour, the final, the second pour, if you will, or the
Speaker 178
1:31:28
completion. Is that determination based on
Speaker 164
1:31:32
testing? Yes. Yes. That's the green graph on the screen. That was a non-destructive testing. We took cores, which is physical testing. But those cores were slightly inconclusive.
We have one core that was perfect. We had the other core that had some anomalies in it. Then we chose to do the non-destructive testing because we can't core every square foot of the cap because we won't have a cap left. So it was a non-destructive testing that led to my statement, my conclusion, that the majority of the
Speaker 181
1:32:04
cap is monolithic as originally intended. And what type of coring did
Speaker 164
1:32:08
you do? What cores did you take? The concrete cores, what were they, a four-inch? Almost full depth?
Three horizontal, two vertical cores through the concrete, four-inch diameter. Thank you. So I just want
Speaker 172
1:32:29
to make one concluding statement, and I still stand by my recommendation that I started with when we started this process back in August, that the cap does meet state and federal requirements and is fit for service.
Speaker 164
1:32:45
I honestly, I believe that. That's why I'm here today. I wouldn't say that otherwise. I'm a consulting engineer. My reputation is everything, and I wouldn't make that lightly. Also that it, I firmly believe, and I made this statement in the first meeting with the commissioner in the bridge office that, and this, again, my professional opinion and my experience, that the removal, the demolition of this cap element causes more harm to the remaining structure
than the issue we've been discussing today that we've shown is not an issue. I've made this statement many times in my career before that this fix is worse than the issue we're trying to resolve, the cure is worse than the illness. To remove a 10-foot tall by 8.5-foot wide 120 feet long cap that's up 60 feet in the air is not an easy task. It requires brute force.
That force is then transferred down through the column and the rest of the structure. That force is more than the bridge will ever see in its entire life, and you're going to do that on day one to replace a cap. I stand against that as a practicing engineer. I just wanted to be on record for that in any case. Senator Hester,
Speaker 186
1:34:07
you're going to ask for a question. Hey, so I'll ask the department here
Senator Bart Hester
Unverified
1:34:11
in a minute. But could you explain to me what you're saying this is fine. What is their position, their technical position on why it needs to be replaced
other than there was a gap in the poor time, even though the poor, when your position was within the tolerances of your
Speaker 164
1:34:28
retardant? I can't speak for the department, of course. I'll let them do that. I can give my impressions of the department's concerns and comments as we went through this process. So the initial concern was that the first layer of concrete, or the layer of concrete after they got back up on the works post the electrical storm, had set. And from that set, the second layer of concrete didn't blend into the first to form a monolithic.
So there's no gap, there's no joint, there's just an interface between those two. And the analysis we did assumed a hard interface. In fact, the analysis we did assumed an interface like this table that had been sitting out and cured for some time, and then you pour new concrete on top of it. That was the analysis. That was the assumptions that were used. That was the conservatism. So we went through the process. The original concern was because of that plane, there was a potential slip that could occur.
Picture two 2x4s just slapped on top of each other, and people were concerned that that would form a slip plane, and the original basis of design was no longer being met. that our analysis went through the detail very refined detail of if that plane did exist this that the cap still meets the original basis of died still meets code requirement and that that was a long process down a road of different
opinions engineering is still an art form so it takes a little while to for everybody to get on the same page sometimes but that's what we demonstrated. So the strength requirement that is the primary strength requirement of the structure bending shear and so on is met. The remaining concern that with the department was that if that plane is still there that plane could be an issue over time and I can't deny that because we don't know particularly at the time that statement was made. So the non-destructive
testing was was performed to investigate if that plane really does exist or not the green was was demonstration to me that that plane does not exist as previously discussed so the conditions were much better all right did i go did i go too far we've got one more question i think then
we'll move on to the next slide. Representative, if you
Speaker 179
1:36:57
recognize. Thank you. Between the old and the new
concrete, was there any supplement or augmentation done to the reinforcement pattern, meaning the reinforcing the vertical and horizontal? Was there something done since we had a cold and you were coming back on top? Did you do anything with the reinforcing? To my understanding, of course
Speaker 164
1:37:18
I wasn't in the field, but from the investigation and discussion we had. Nothing was done with the reinforcing. But I will add this, that the concrete had a five-hour retarder on it. And from the math I did, it was just getting to be five hours old.
So it was still fresh concrete. It's not as if we left the works and came back a week later, then we would have a discussion where there's an actual cold joint there. But there was not. Our refined analysis to that point included all the reinforcement that was in the works as part of our analysis on capacity. We recognize that there are some instances where if you had a cold joint like that, you might add additional reinforcement for just subjectively.
In this case, none was added because the concrete really wasn't cured. It was only five hours old. So the decision in the field was to continue with the pour, and I understand the vibrator that they use to consolidate the concrete could penetrate into the, into the lower layer. Um, so, but again, I just wanted to point out that the analysis was, was on the only re only on
Speaker 173
1:38:31
the reinforcement in the works, uh, based on a, an assumed plane, uh, of aged concrete. In
Speaker 179
1:38:37
your position is the continuity was achieved through
the retardation and using the vibrator to reconstitute the concrete together from within the two pores. Our analysis assumed it was not, it was conservative.
Speaker 164
1:38:52
The engineering analysis assumed that there was an actual flat plane there. So just real quick for code, the first assumption is completely monolithic concrete, solid block of concrete. The second assumption for code is a construction joint, planned construction joint, actually
in the bottom cap there's a planned construction joint where the surface is roughed to at least a quarter inch amplitude, so the surface roughness of about like this. And then the third assumption is a completely smooth surface. So the purpose of that is obviously in a monolithic concrete it acts as a single unit. In the roughened surface the roughness interlocks the concrete so it can act more like a monolithic surface but there's a reduction in capacity to account for that possibility
that doesn't and then of course for a smooth surface there's no aggregate interlock effectively just some friction and that's what's assumed for for that analysis that lower level smooth smooth surface is what we assumed for the analysis to determine capacity and my assert my my my my assertion on the non-destructive testing is is we have much better than that again green would be monolithic yellow would be that middle layer and the middle layer increases the concrete capacity by about a factor of two
so all right i think we have one more question senator and then
Speaker 196
1:40:19
let's try to get through the presentation the uh the retardant you use is one
Speaker 114
1:40:29
way of extending that life uh does the do the weather conditions play a factor also in this time frame for curing that i'm assuming it was not just lightning it was raining and that would allow for for more moisture to be in that in in that product correct where it would not cure as fast well um i can't
Speaker 164
1:40:52
speak to that. We do have the superintendent and supervisor for the joint venture here today to talk about the actual placement, if you'd like. I really can't speak to the material, as far as, except for my experience as an engineer. But I always like to say concrete's a lot like baking. Yeah, it depends a little bit on the weather and all some other conditions. But unlike baking, we're dealing with a different kind of material. And most of the folks that place it have, you know, multiple years of experience and place thousands and thousands of yards of this
stuff. But what I've seen in the field is, you know, when the concrete's coming out a little different, the people call to the truck, people call to the plant, and we make adjustments as we go. We don't necessarily plan for rain, but rain does occur
Speaker 114
1:41:41
from time to time. Well, a rain would extend the time frame for drying and curing, wouldn't it? Well, no.
Speaker 164
1:41:47
Technically, the cure from the concrete comes from the hydration of the cement, and that's all internal. When we mix water into the mix, we can affect that. Surface water on top will not affect that. I think it should be
Speaker 201
1:42:02
noted that this pour was occurring in the middle of the morning, so from, I think the pour started at 2 or 1? It started around like 11 a.m.
Speaker 200
1:42:12
or 11 p.m. rather. 11 p.m. and extended throughout the morning so you don't have that that heat generation during the
Speaker 201
1:42:18
day that would that would accelerate the hydration and that was probably the biggest factor and and the reason why again back to planning why we why we chose to pour it in the middle of the night or beginning of the day so so that we could reduce the risk of of the concrete accelerating on
Speaker 154
1:42:38
us and to that end just keep in mind
on page six the reason we ran those sonic tests were to you know clarify that this is still a monolithic four and it did not have you know the joint and the tests show uh you
Speaker 206
1:42:54
know that it's positive it's it's you know a good pour yeah and i'd
Speaker 201
1:42:59
also say if the if the committee would like testimony from the superintendent that actually placed the
Speaker 149
1:43:05
concrete he's here and available um He was able to work the initial lift, and we testified to that effect.
Speaker 154
1:43:13
So I'm going to cut back to slide five and give you just some more of our reasons why. Obviously, cost and schedule impact. I'm going to get to a slide here in a minute. The act of God scenario, the act of God which provides relief of responsibility to the contractor for unseen circumstances, this surely qualifies the lightning storm. I think Vince kind of went through the fact that through our engineering analysis and non-destructive testing, this would be economic waste, in our opinion, to remove and replace
this gap because it's not needed. And of particular importance is the fact that RDOT themselves has said that the existing bridge that the commuters are driving on now is structurally deficient. And this letter was dated 2015. if we continue to push the limit on extending this project it's we're going to continue to drive on a structurally deficient bridge I'm going to slide over to slide seven now just briefly talk about the schedule and cost impact you know if we could get this thing approved and move forward we could finish this you know this year in the fall of 2020 if we have to remove
and replace that cap likely it's going to be the summer of 2021 and if we fall into another weather event or the core releasing more water from bull shoals this could go into the winter 2022 and we'd really like to avoid that um i want to just note in particular that we've got a total of four unsuccessful claims already with the department we're in the process of going through the claims commission to get through those we want to bring that to your attention because with these there were probably cost mitigating
circumstances that could have been taken at the time the the three high water level events that we've got the department had the the opportunity at our request to suspend the job but what does that get us well that gets us a lot of equipment that can be pulled off the job and not be on rent we have several cranes out there six or eight cranes at a time during a lot of these flood events and they're at about thirty thousand dollars a month so you know you do the numbers One of our high water events was seven months long, and we could have easily suspended the job, demobbed, remobbed at a much reduced cost.
So before we go into conclusion, I'd like to have Gary talk a little bit about our final position that we've sent to
Speaker 210
1:45:42
the department. Sure. So I don't want to belabor anything we've already gone over too much. We did send a
Speaker 152
1:45:48
letter on February 7th to Chief Banks. I believe that made it into your packet. The point, we had really three purposes of that letter. One was to recap the status of the project right now, that being project is shut down due to high water. We couldn't get to the pier cap to take it out
if we wanted to at this moment, but that it was stabilized. Second point was just to recap our position relative to the dispute, and we've already gone over our thinking on that. The third point of this letter was really to once again say to the department, there are better ways to skin this cat. There are less invasive ways. If they continue to believe, in spite of the overwhelming body of testing
and engineering judgment that we've presented, even if they believe that there is some long-term durability issue that somebody is going to have to deal with someday. There are other ways to remedy those that are far less invasive, far less impactful on the schedule, far less costly. We had numerous discussions about these other remedies and all we've ever gotten back is remove and replace so the other point of that letter was to
say there are other ways why can't we get together and try to come up with a collaborative way of addressing this that falls short of another year of construction so what we got back which I believe is also in your packet is a letter from the chief engineer the main points of that letter seem to be that we were somehow negligent in the decision-making process as to beginning the
pour and as to continuing the pour after the the suspension and I think this is all about trying to to deflect the act of God argument that we've that we've put forward as Vince said we do have two people who were on site that evening and and that morning who can go over and answer any questions as to what they knew, when they knew it, and why they decided to go forward with this thing.
But the fact of the matter is, the department says we had a questionable forecast. We had something between a 20 and 30% chance of rain in the forecasted period of time we were gonna be making this placement. Now you folks know that in Arkansas, if you didn't pour concrete, anytime you had a 20 to 30% chance of rain, you would never get the first bridge built around here. I mean, it requires a certain amount of common sense
at the point of placement, and it's not really subject to a second guessing now. The other point was the department seems to think that their representatives challenged us on that decision. That did not happen, not according to our folks. Again, I encourage you to ask them about what went on during that period of time. With respect to restarting the pour, we've already talked about the retarder in the mix.
One thing I will tell you is that is our concrete plant. Mahan Construction owns it. We manned it. We did the mix designs. We did the testing after the fact to show that we had five hours of retarding. That mix was dialed in for this very purpose. So the point of that is when we came back to pour it again, our superintendent, our poor superintendent, will tell you that, yes, he could get a vibrator into that mix,
and this is back to the representative's question a few minutes ago. Yes, the mix was retarded five hours, and yes, we were able to get a vibrator into the surface to reactivate that mix. It brought up cream. That knits that surface together. So yeah, we believe we have a monolithic product out there, and the tests support that. The other point in RDOT's letter is that we have chosen to drag this thing out
by not following their instructions from the get-go. As I mentioned earlier, I've been doing this for 37 years. We're not accustomed to taking an immediate remove and replace on something that we know is wrong. And we're going to take some time to step back and investigate that before we just go in there blindly and start tearing things out, especially when they could do more harm to what's left than what we might have in place.
um we followed the department's um procedure for dispute we we asked for a reconsideration by the resident engineer he said no we pursued this with the chief engineer over this course of time we were trading analyses trading test results offering solutions it wasn't until november 25th that the chief engineer gave a final decision on this matter.
Unfortunately, on that weekend, what did I say? Okay, I think that same time frame is when we got the notice from the Corps of Engineers, oh, by the way, we're releasing from Bull Shoals, you're going to be underwater. But we didn't have much time to react. All we could do is stabilize the site, and that's when we decided to go set this additional steel so that if those shoring towers got taken out, we weren't going to lose a whole span. which would have made this a whole different conversation, by the way. So the point of all this is we disagree with the department's characterization of what we did, when we did it, and why we did it.
And again, I would invite you to talk to the people that were actually there. What we have right now is a 10-day window identified in the chief engineer's last letter that says by which we have to say that we're either going to take this thing out, at which point we can't get to it now. We're still underwater. The access roads are underwater as we sit here today. So I'm not sure how quickly we could even do that.
or if we refuse the department will begin default proceedings against us so those are the options we have as we sit here today all right thank
you members I'm assuming we have some questions but
probably should set some parameters so just so y'all understand it's not all right we're not a committee that's going to litigate you know between you and RDOT I mean that that is if it were to go to claims, which there's purview committee established for that. But at the same
time, part of what this committee does is take a look at individual projects and try to find out what's on schedule, what's over budget, what's going on, so we can provide some type of communication back to folks at home that have questions about why something may be appearing to take longer than what was originally projected. In addition to that, as you heard and were able to set through. We're also looking at the functions of RDOT, how that works, and one
of those items is it may be that we should look at is the dispute resolution methods that are utilized
by RDOT, and so I would like us to keep our discussion kind of in that frame again and not try to get beyond that. We're not going to push to a resolution today. That's
Speaker 214
1:53:57
not the responsibility of this committee. Senator Rice, I think.
Senator Terry Rice
Unverified
1:54:00
Thank you, and I appreciate your description that made it understandable with the with what I understand federal requirements federal standards for the testing you're saying have been met and understanding this is an RDOT project
that I'm guessing has a good bit of federal money in it this can't be the first time this has ever happened what happens in other states when you have this is there any type of a federal mediator any type of a federal oversight testing for an interstate and i understand the concern of liability from a resident engineer or district engineer or whatever we're talking about
always not wanting something to come back
on them. Can you give me any background of what's happened in other
Speaker 146
1:55:07
states that might be an option? Certainly we can. Again, I have over 40 years of contracting experience in the states here, as well as Gary's service to the industry as well. And I think we both would attest that most departments are interested in finding a solution and not just taking things down
and moving the project forward and getting it completed. Certainly, that's our interest as well. And there's various avenues out there, and it would have to be mutually agreed, obviously, by both parties. A mediator could be offered to try to mediate the solution between the parties.
Speaker 201
1:55:54
We could get an independent third engineer to take a look at the findings that these two fine professional engineers have rendered.
Speaker 146
1:56:09
And just sitting down and being able to work through the issue. We've certainly gotten to a point that there's an understanding that you don't have a strength issue here. So that allows you to proceed with the work and solve the durability issue. And that's what's a little confounding about the whole situation. We don't quite understand that. But reasonable people can be reasonable, and we're here and interested to find a solution to it. I don't know, Gary, if you had another comment.
Speaker 203
1:56:41
Yeah, my experience has been it varies from state
Speaker 152
1:56:45
to state as to the involvement of the FHWA in issues like this. If you go to West Virginia, the FHWA sits in every meeting and has a huge sway in what that state does. But you go to other states, you would never see a federal representative. I believe in this particular state, we've seen FHWA representatives at the site on several occasions.
But to answer your question, I don't believe the feds will involve themselves to make some arbiter-type decision on this. I've never seen them do that. So, I mean, there are other solutions available, such as Randy outlined, if we wanted to agree, if RDOT would want to agree to that sort of an approach. And I think it sounds reasonable. All
right. Senator Cheatham, recognized for a question.
Senator Eddie Cheatham
Unverified
1:57:44
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I may overstep a little bit. I have curiosity, I guess. Just a couple things, and I'll be very brief. You know, you stopped your poor, and then weather cleared, started back. Who, and you have people there, does R-Dot have people there? Who said you can start back? Do you make that decision, or does R-Dot make that decision? It's
Speaker 204
1:58:07
typically a mutual decision. We have superintendents of the site. We had to make the decision to abandon the poor because of safety conditions,
Speaker 146
1:58:14
and then we rendered the judgment that it was safe to get back on site and resume the poor. There's quality inspection and I believe department inspection as well that are present on site and the team will agree to continue the poor. And that is to Tony's point that we never heard that there was actually a problem with the continuation of the poor until three or four days later.
Speaker 152
1:58:48
real quick? Sorry. In this particular situation, there was a third-party inspector that was hired, a consultant inspector that was hired by the state who was on-site. There was also a state representative, a QC representative on-site. They were very aware that the poor was restarting. They did
Gary Answer
Unverified
1:59:06
not approach any of our people and voice the first concern over restarting this poor. The
Senator Eddie Cheatham
Unverified
1:59:13
other thing, Mr. Chairman, is just, y'all did tests,
you know, have you done tests since the cap's completed? Did the state go back and test also, or
Speaker 220
1:59:22
did they just take your word for it? I'm not aware of it,
Speaker 222
1:59:30
Vince, in your discussions. Did you? Yeah, they
Speaker 152
1:59:33
took one core, right? The state asked us, after the first meeting, the state asked us to pursue two additional vertical cores through the peer cap. Only one of those cores was taken, and I believe the department has made their entire position based on a single core and a certain anomaly that they've identified in one core
Gary Answer
Unverified
1:59:53
and disregarded the other five cores, I believe, we made.
Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Representative Dotson, you recognize for question.
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
2:00:06
Thank you, Mr. Chair. So throughout this whole process, has the department met with you at all to try to work out or resolve some sort of a solution other than just remove and replace?
Speaker 154
2:00:21
We have met with the department once in the field and twice at the department's location.
And the first initial meeting was to discuss the issue at hand, and that's when we went and started doing our initial engineering analysis. The second time was to meet with Mr. Banks and discuss, you know, our position that we felt the cap was flying. He expressed his concerns, and then we went back again and did some more engineering analysis to address his concerns.
Speaker 226
2:00:53
And then the third time we met with just staff. We didn't meet with Mr. Banks.
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
2:00:59
So did they give you any indication on why, after all the analysis and things that you've done to try to prove this point, why the position didn't change.
Speaker 222
2:01:12
So through the course of this, I've had, in addition to the meetings,
Speaker 152
2:01:18
I've had several conversations with Chief Engineer Banks. The position, as he relayed it, was simply that he was responsible for the longevity of this bridge
and no one has been able to guarantee him that it will last 50, 75, 100 years. Essentially, the department has put us in a position where we have to prove a negative. We have to prove there won't be a problem with this pier cap 60 years hence when ultimately that has everything to do with maintenance, high water at the site any number of things but the only the only reason i've i've been given is
you can't guarantee it therefore we
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
2:02:13
don't want it um and then just speaking from a contractor standpoint that's bidding on projects and trying to to build highways not only in arkansas but across other states as well in the future would this depending on how this is resolved would this affect maybe not you personally you might never want to do business in arkansas again but would this affect if you saw this in another state your your bids for doing projects or work
in arkansas would the cost go up down stay the same if if we don't honor this act of god
Speaker 152
2:02:56
clause in the contract. Not to bare my soul before the committee here, but we had a situation my company did years ago in West Virginia where the state's refusal to address issues as they came up that led everything to the courthouse steps ultimately
made our company as a group decide, you know what, we don't need this. They are a major player right in our back door. We're in Columbus. They're a couple hours away, and we made a decision in that particular case to answer your question. We just weren't going to do business in West Virginia anymore. That is a huge step for a contractor. You know, we're pretty much driven by having to feed the bulldog, so it's hard to carve out an area or a
Speaker 203
2:03:43
client that you're not going to work for, But, yeah, it does happen.
Speaker 201
2:03:48
I would also note that we take contracts and the conditions on
Speaker 146
2:03:52
the jobs very seriously. And when we prepare our price proposals, we review these things in infinite detail. And we rely on provisions that allow for acts of God and rely on provisions that allow for suspension. And we expect that when conditions are primed for them, they would be enacted. um let's just only do
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
2:04:15
respect um just to make sure i'm looking at the right one in this report
uh this is the white river straits or not sure it's in prairie county um contract for a hundred million dollars that's correct okay and it says right now that it's 81.6 percent complete so it still has another 18 million five 18 five on it is that i believe that accounting is correct okay thank you
Speaker 230
2:04:45
all right do we have senator stubblefield
yes sir i just have one brief
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
2:04:53
question uh did you say you poured this at 11 o'clock in the morning no in the evening you poured it at night 11 a.m yes
Speaker 146
2:05:01
and then we were and then we it obviously ran into the early mornings I think we finished the port at 6 in the morning. Okay. That's all
I want to say. Thank you. And just for clarification, do you all have any other projects going on in the state? No, we do not. Is this your first project in the state?
I can't. It's Parsons first. Parsons first project in the state. May hands as well. Okay. All right.
All right. With that, I think we don't have any more, no more questions for the contractor. Representative, you're recognized for one
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
2:05:32
of those questions. Thank you. Real short. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Since this is a federal highway, is there
any percentage that the federal would pick up on with this, or would we be paying for this all from Arkansas budget? Can you answer it? It's a very good question, and we're looking into that.
Speaker 154
2:05:58
But I believe, and don't hold me to this, but I think after the budget has been approved, any changes relating to the claims at this point would, I think, fall on Arkansas and not FHWA. So I don't know if that would change if they stepped in now and helped negotiate it or not, but we're still looking into that. Yeah, and we're not experts in that
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
2:06:28
but there's a chance that the federal could pick up on a portion it'd
Speaker 241
2:06:32
be worth looking into thank you mr chairman
all right do we have any other questions all right seeing none thank you
all uh for coming today where we at me who i'm sorry senator johnson you're blending in with that chair
Speaker 114
2:06:50
that sure sorry i had a jacket on earlier that counts the uh how many engineers we got up there
how hard is it to after you've went through all the analysis to have to bank on the act of God provision I know that is not part of that analytical brain because I've got them in my family because you've done all the analysis that you can do and then that's what you found in your contract
that would allow for this kind of across-the-board action without analysis? Is that a pretty good assumption on how your feeling is about this? I'm not sure I understand the question, sir. I see the analysis that you guys have done with your product, and you've done everything that you can do to analyze your product and you're dealing with
an agency that you don't feel like has done the analysis other than what you've done correct that's correct so i mean i know the analytical part of your brain and this is what the provision that you have to back up on to help cover this outside the logic. And I know that's got to be frustrating with that many engineers in one place.
Speaker 246
2:08:34
Let me start this. I think the general question
is you relied and think you have the ability to rely on the act of God provision in the contract. And so just for an example, you operate, you know, across the world, I guess, if I understood things earlier. I'm assuming an act of God provision is something that is in most of these contracts. Yes, it is. Have you been able to exercise that in a similar situation in other states?
I mean, that provision, has it been able to be utilized or is it something that is rarely utilized? I mean, we had historic flooding in the state on your project, and that's not constituted as an act of God to date, right? So would that have been an act of God in other states, something that you could have depended on when you made your assumptions, when you made the bid? Yeah,
Speaker 149
2:09:29
I mean, in respect to the flooding, there are a couple of provisions that you can afford yourself to, certainly the act of God, because we didn't have any control of the flood.
Also, there's a differing site condition with the floodwaters receding into the project area. And there's also the decision to make a reasonable conclusion that you can suspend the work. So all those provisions are available to us, and we were expecting to be able to seek those remedies. I mean, certainly our judgment, and I think to the Senator's question, is that we don't think it's necessary to have to go to the provision, accept the cap and move on but certainly the the state is entitled to their opinion and if they
want to remove it they're entitled to that but we're
Speaker 153
2:10:18
also entitled to remedy. Okay and I would interject too that of all the engineering
Speaker 154
2:10:24
analysis we've provided we've basically been given a response of remove or replace and no cost to the department and there hasn't been any interjection or contradiction to our engineering analysis. We did discuss the engineering analysis with the EOR, the engineering record, and the department, but from a communication standpoint, we don't have a
lot of arguments back from the department on our analysis and our
Speaker 246
2:10:49
testing. And certainly we can proceed through to the claims commission. We're using our own treasure to
Speaker 149
2:10:54
finish the work. And as you can see, this is a lengthy process. It takes years because of the environment in which we're working in and and you know we understand ultimately that may be where we stand next is coming back to a claims Commission to to plead our case we just we just say as I made in my opening statement that we're to where the
decision process in a junction right now okay we we can we can go down one avenue that minimizes the amount of that cost when we seek a claim to the Commission which we ultimately think we're going to end up there or we end up But with a much bigger bill, as Tony had outlined, from $6 to $12 to potentially $20 million, depending upon what happens to us. So we felt the committee should be apprised of that, and that's why we're here today. All right.
Thank you very much. Again, thank you for presentation today, taking the time. I'm assuming that the highway department will probably have some comments.
Want to make some comments? Okay. No. I mean, I'm going to guess that there's some questions, because I
heard that there were going to be some questions just in the rumblings. And I do have a couple, too. So if you guys could vacate the deal, that would be awesome. Very good. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. I didn't miss any questions, right? We were all done. Okay.
So, again, our goal, I mean, we're not a committee that's going to litigate. There's a whole separate committee that would take that on if that were to be the case. But I think the question is a little bit on this negotiation process with the Highway Department. A couple of questions I just had in just kind of listening was, I mean, how often do we allow a contractor to utilize the Act of God provision in the contract? How many times has that happened, let's say, over the last 10 years? I have no idea. Zero, five, once?
I have no idea. Okay. Can I get... I mean, I can certainly try to find out. If we
Speaker 253
2:13:01
do a little research on that, just so we know. Your question is, how often is
the act of God? How many instances, let's just
say over the course of the last 10 years, how many instances has the Department of Transportation accepted that act of God as part of an alteration to, you know, a construction project? Does that make sense? It does. Okay. And then I guess my second question then would be on the suspension of services.
So, you know, we've had historic flooding in the state, and we can't get the Corps to stop releasing water up at Bull Shoals, which creates a pretty big issue for anyone that's trying to build a bridge, especially on the river there. I mean, how many times in the last 10 years have we allowed someone to suspend, you know, construction on a project? because i think they've requested it four times been denied four times or something along those
lines if i'm reading the presentation correctly and i didn't
Speaker 252
2:14:01
know if that was a common i mean i i know that it's been allowed but i can't i can't give you a number but how many your question is how many times has historic flooding been not historic flooding just allowed
for a suspension allowed for suspension so the contract requests a suspension because of you know natural occurrences whatever's happening and then it's accepted i mean i i mean i would ask but i'm going to guess i'm going to get the answer i don't know why why would you not allow it on this particular instance
Speaker 256
2:14:29
i'm certain that we have allowed extensions but i once again let's just look at
their four like so they've requested four times it's been denied four times we've had historic flooding why was it denied on this particular project if
it was going to save, you know, the project money in an essence, in some ways, time, it sounded like. And then I
get, I mean, at some point, I mean, just curiosity, what is, so there's been a
case made. They've presented, you know, presented information, had some studies done, had some engineers, you know, take a look at the project. what is the you know i would assume with time being of the essence on a project like this you know that's a factor the highway department's going to take that in consideration on some type of negotiation on an instance like this i mean does the highway department see anything different i mean is it able to i mean how did it come to its conclusion that's a tear down rebuild only does that make sense i mean i get the safety side of it if there is no way
and the whole thing is going to be safety issue related, fine, I'll accept that as the answer, but it seems like there's a little bit more to it than that, I guess, at least on research and input from
Speaker 252
2:15:52
the highway department. Okay, I can try to get an answer to that, but I can tell you that the answers have been provided to the contractor through the appeal that they've made to the resident engineer so y'all did your own study and they've they've and then from the
from the chief engineer and basically this is a contract dispute the resolution of which will likely end up in the claims commission as you've noted and and as you've noted i mean but is that the goal i mean is it no that it's never the goal but i just i think that's where it's been acknowledge that this particular matter will likely end up so how do you move forward if you're a contractor then if
you're if you're pretty much told that you're going to go to
complains and you're going to take a chance on whether or not you're going to be you know recoup some of this or you're going to recoup some of the money or whatever you know i mean that how do they move forward with the project and then
they tear down and just hope when they get the claims that they can make their argument that the act of god or
Speaker 252
2:17:00
that it was unnecessary or whatever it may be well that's the mechanism set up for dispute resolution so i mean yes i mean if they believe they're right that then that they that they should not have to do so then they would
seek reimbursement for that expenditure in doing what it is they believe they didn't have to do and if we and then if we were required to pay for it then we would through the claims commission process and on
that the claims commission monies that just comes out of rdott that would be
Speaker 252
2:17:29
if it were awarded it comes back through the legislative council and for approval of that expenditure no no yes yeah but it's
just going to be rdott monies that could have been spent on repairs maintenance whatever is going to get spent on you know covering that claim is that right
Speaker 261
2:17:45
um actually sometimes there's a special expense appropriation for certain expenditures
Speaker 264
2:17:48
that's my understanding all right i'm not going to try to get
on that i may not understand that enough in my last question i promise is on the letter that's from rdott to mr yanser i'm not sure if you have that or not it was part of their packet but it the third paragraph down after the bullet points says your notification of the intent to elevate the issues this issue beyond the department and outside the scope of the contract is noted and will remain on record
I'm trying to understand what that sentence means I mean number one noted to who noted why and on record where and for what purpose because this is a public forum it was going to be noted and it was going to be on record so what is the purpose of making that statement what what does that serve I
Speaker 252
2:18:42
didn't make the statement I can inquire of the chief engineer as to which is I assume that was, it's his letter that you're reading from, as to exactly what.
Emanuel Banks, chief engineer. Emanuel Banks, deputy engineer, chief engineer. Yeah, I mean, because I don't know
Speaker 252
2:19:00
what that, is that a. . . I believe he must have been responding to something that was said in their letter about taking it
Speaker 255
2:19:06
outside of the department's resolution process. I think that's in response of
being discovered that there was, or, you know, being notified that there was going to be discussion of it in this committee I think that's what that sentence is in reference to would have been helpful to know yeah I guess
again be one more thing that I'll just wait to get an answer for but that that is to me is some very odd wording to say that you're going to note and keep a record of something that is already noted and has record and is on film and whatever it may be or you know being recorded that's that I would just say that that sounds like a threat to me I don't I don't know what that, but in threat in
Speaker 252
2:19:46
what direction or away, I don't know. I think sometimes the engineer's letters are unusually worded in my legal opinion as well. Okay. All right. Now with that, we have
any other questions? All right. Representative Dotson, you're recognized and then.
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
2:20:00
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess let's look through here real quick. You've written down a few things, which we've covered that so I guess the big question that I've got is if this goes through claims um and it may be something
that we'll have to have staff get in here if you don't know the answer but if it goes through claims where does the does it come out of RDOT's budget or does it come out of some other if if an award is made
Speaker 252
2:20:29
it would be best if i asked someone at rdott on the on the in the fiscal uh department um the chief fiscal officer but it's my understanding that it depends on the size of the claim as to whether or not it comes out of rdott's budget or if it comes to this body for an additional appropriation for the payment i'm not trying to avoid your question but but that's the best
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
2:20:59
answer i can give you my understanding of it is that it wouldn't come out of
rdot's budget so you have no skin in the game either way um that that's as i understand it the way claims commission works is it comes out of claims budget not out of a department's budget so So, and then I'm very interested in finding out what analysis the department actually did to determine why the cap is not stable
and needs to have to be tore down and replaced from a structural engineering standpoint. Their entire analysis on that, please. I know you don't have that with you here today, but hopefully we can get that. And if the department's going to require us to waste $12 to $20 million, I want an answer on that when you're coming to us and asking us for more money all the time.
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
2:22:04
would like to look at calling another meeting
when we can get some more of these answers from RDOT, but that would
be yeah I mean if I'm understanding things right the discussion is on just how does dispute resolution actually work with RDOT where does the claims you know if monies are awarded by the claims commission you know to to someone opposing RDOT where do those monies come from it's my understanding and I'm going to be wrong most likely on some part of this but
they have a 750 or at one point they had a $750,000 appropriation for claims it may be more than
that now I'm not sure that's something that we looked at historically you know and if they do not so as an example we were talking about the state police if the money is not in their budget for that so they haven't received they don't have enough money to pay let's just say this was a 20 million dollar claim then there would have to be some transfer to cover those funds that would be probably general revenue
of some kind it wouldn't come out of Ardeth's budget it would come unless I
Speaker 273
2:23:07
The representative, I can ask for a question. Yes, I know you had inspectors on that site that night. What was the reason they didn't stop the poor afterward if they thought it was going to be a separation in the pier?
Speaker 252
2:23:37
I'm noting that. I'm here to represent the department to say that the response of the department will be in the normal contract resolution, which is basically through the department and Claims Commission. But I will note your question is, if there were inspectors on site, why did they not stop the poor? Is that your question? That's correct. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Any other questions? Thank you.
Speaker 114
2:24:08
I'm sorry, Senator, you're recognized. Ma'am, in your last statements before I say anything else, you said it's going to be handled through the regular contracts resolution. So is the department going
Speaker 252
2:24:32
to answer our questions? I'm collecting these questions and will attempt to provide answers at the next committee if the
committee at the next meeting of this committee if they still want answers to these questions yes I mean we want to be responsive the department wants to be responsive to this committee as it relates to the dispute between the contractor and the department um as senator dismayne has noted this committee will not be resolving the dispute between the department and the and the contractor on this matter but we want to provide information to this committee as it relates to the operations of the of the department that will satisfy you as to your questions so we will answer your questions
but hopefully this matter will be resolved in a way that is acceptable to
Speaker 114
2:25:22
add, Chair, to Representative Dotson, is there a process of analysis for strength and durability that the department has that this project or any other project has to go through, or is it just based on the resident engineer or the head engineer's opinion?
Or is there an analysis for strength and durability that the department has for projects such as these or is it just based on opinion? I'm noting your question, sir. Thank you. You're welcome.
Speaker 280
2:26:06
And also we'll have staff assist because I
know you've been hit with a bunch of questions they'll go back watch the video and make sure that we get that to you also to help kind of summarize
the request from the committee are there any other questions well we've had a very long day today so members I appreciate your time thank you for coming and testimony from everyone involved today with that have a good afternoon we're adjourned You
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Update from Guidehouse LLP on study of the Arkansas Department of Transportation as required by Act 298 of 2019
C. Report from the Arkansas Highway Commission on the progress of each public road construction project of ten million dollars ($10,000,000) or more as required by ACA § 27-65-107(a)(19)
D. Discussion on project to replace the White River Bridge on I-40 in Prairie County
E. Other Business
F. Adjournment
Documents
Speakers
Senator Jonathan Dismang Chair
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Sagar Gokhale
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Senator Bart Hester
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Senator Terry Rice
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Senator Gary Stubblefield
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Representative Johnny Rye
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Gary Answer
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Senator Eddie Cheatham
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Representative Jim Dotson
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