Town pulls patience, plug on plant contractor

The city of Coulee Dam ran out of patience with its wastewater treatment plant builder last week, instructing the city attorney to send McClure and Sons, Inc., a letter with an October 1 deadline.

The Mill Creek, Washington-based company was awarded a $5.6 million contract to build the plant in 2017, finishing most of the work — but not all.

The city’s engineers have expressed frustration but counseled patience, even though they said delays could not be attributed to shutdowns during the Covid pandemic, delays which mostly took place before it, but included the extra addition of a new lift station to bring Elmer City’s waste up to the new plant at its higher elevation.

The unfinished portion of work, consisting of mostly smaller items, has been the subject of discussion and frustration at city council meetings. It has also made it difficult to peg the project with a final price tag.

Such projects have built-in “contingency funds” that can be tapped with “change orders” for inevitable unforeseen developments, and the complete cost of such civic construction projects is often not precisely known before the final inspection is passed and bills presented.

For Coulee Dam, that has presented extra problems because it is dealing with its major wastewater customer Elmer City. The two towns have been honoring a decades-old agreement that calls for Elmer City to pay a portion of necessary capital upgrades, but that bill can’t be settled until the total is known.

City Attorney Michael Howe wrote that Coulee Dam had set “numerous deadlines” over the years and that the last one, which the company promised to meet, had passed on June 1, nearly four months ago.

Unfinished work, he said, includes coating of the interior steel in a dewatering room, correction of two defectively installed valves, and remaining “miscellaneous Defective Work items.” After Oct. 1, that work will be completed by the city as necessary, he wrote, and any additional work needed will result in a change in the amount of the contract total.

The city council voted to authorize Howe to send the letter at an online meeting Sept. 15, which was a second carryover from a council meeting a week earlier, which had also been continued to Sept. 13 in executive session.

The city’s response has been building since at least last April.

“They don’t respond to phone calls, emails, letters. They just continue to show up, do a little work and leave,” Kurt Holland, principal engineer with Varela Engineering & Management, the city’s engineering firm on the project, told the council at a meeting in April 14, when he estimated the plant to be 95% complete. “They are substantially complete, but they won’t sign a certificate of substantial completion; it took six months to sign their last pay estimate.”

At their open meeting Wednesday, the council voted unanimously to OK the letter. Howe said he would send it the next morning.