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player ready...Standing by the Kinzie Street bridge and watching city workers struggle to repair the ruptured underground tunnel, it is hard not to do a little mental arithmetic.
The place is littered with expensive machines.
Standing idle are two drill rigs, which are typically leased to the city for upwards of $5,000 an hour, according to contractors, and four 50-ton cranes, which can run as much as $600 an hour. Nearby, a flotilla of front-end loaders and mud-encrusted earthmovers stands at the ready.
Some contractors working on the repairs estimate that the cost to taxpayers-for the machinery, materials and the City Hall bureaucrats who swarm over the site in yellow hard hats-has run at times as high as $100,000 an hour.
City officials say they have no way of estimating the cost thus far of the tunnel-repair effort, but when it is over, the patching and pumping alone may rank among the Chicago area`s priciest public works efforts, perhaps even rivaling Mayor Richard Daley`s proposed downtown trolley project, estimated at $590 million.
Officials say it will likely be months before they can begin to attach a price tag to what could go down as the most expensive Band-Aid in Chicago history. One reason they cannot estimate a price is the lack of paperwork.
The firm that has been spearheading the repair effort, Kenny Construction Co., has been working since Monday without a written contract, according to its vice president, John Kenny.
And the various subcontractors on the job say they have been given no consistent guidelines about where to submit their bills.
Some have been charging Kenny for the work they perform. Some plan to bill the city. And others, who are already providing supplies to the city for other public works projects, say they are treating the emergency tunnel repair as an extension of those pre-existing contracts.
”Because of the emergency nature of the work, those details have not been worked out yet,” Kenny said Thursday.
Al Nowak, senior vice president of Material Service Corp., said his company had been ordered to bring crushed rock to the site at various times by City Hall, Kenny Construction and a second construction outfit, Palumbo Brothers Inc., and will end up billing all three.
”You have to treat each of them as a customer,” Nowak said.
Contractors say their costs have risen in part because they have been forced to spend so much time waiting at the Kinzie Street site while city workers scramble to coordinate the various phases of the emergency project.
A spokesman for one company, Action Cement and Supply, said his trucks had waited as long as 30 hours to drop loads of cement and sand.
Nowak said his trucks had waited at times as long as 20 hours or more.
The trucks cost $50 an hour while they wait, contractors say.
Kenny and others say a formal billing system will be put in place Friday, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers takes over responsibility for directing and funding the repair and drainage effort.
The corps will pay for the repair and drainage costs from the moment the contract is signed, but the city must pick up the tab for the work done in the four days since Monday, officials say.
The federal contract will allow Kenny to be reimbursed completely for the reasonable costs of the job, and then receive a fixed fee, or profit, on top of that. Corps officials would not estimate Kenny`s fee Thursday, saying it will be negotiated over the next 20 days, as the work goes on.
And once the job is done, according to that proposed contract, the corps will audit Kenny`s bills.
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