Growing complaints over Tampa's water reclamation project have prompted a pledge to quicken the timetable.
By KATHRYN WEXLER
Published August 5, 2003
TAMPA - On an otherwise perky lawn of fronds and trees where Culbreath Isles Road and Culbreath Isles Drive N meet, there's a backhoe, a pile of overturned dirt and a puddle of brown water.
Other than the backhoe, which makes periodic appearances on Cecilia Castillo's front yard, the disarray has been there at least two months.
It is but one casualty of the city's reclaimed water project, a massive and slow undertaking that officials say needs to be hustled along.
Castillo, for the record, shrugged over the perpetual dig by her curb.
"I wanted reclaimed water," she said, standing in the door of her comfortable house and smiling, "and if you want something, you have to suffer."
But a growing chorus of residents are not shrugging over delays and destruction to the rights of way that border their property as contractors open the ground to lay pipes.
Homeowners have reported broken sprinklers, damaged driveways or holes in their lawns that have gone unrepaired for weeks or months. In the most dire cases, sewage backed up due to broken sewer lines.
City officials say the suffering has to stop. To that end, they posted letters last week to 11,000 residents, asserting that they're on top of the problems.
The letter, from the city's Wastewater Department, said officials are tightening their oversight of contractors' timetables. It also provided a specific phone number at the Wastewater Department if residents want to complain.
Brad Baird, the department's deputy director, said there is too much lag time between when contractors break ground and when they repair the holes and damage.
"People complain because the restoration was not immediate, it was several months behind," Baird said. "We needed to do better than that."
The letter said the city would aim to ensure that lawns be torn up for no more than three months.
The reclaimed water project is the largest of its kind in the nation, according to city officials. Its first phase, called South Tampa Area Reclaimed Project, or STAR, is a $28-million project designed to pipe wastewater from a treatment plant on Hooker's Point to parts of South Tampa for irrigation.
Most of the work is still expected to be completed by December, Baird said.
The delays partly arise because several specialized crews must perform work on the sites. It's not as simple as opening up a hole, doing some work and sealing it up.
City officials say the work should be done faster. Baird has insisted that two contractors, UtilX Corp. and Volt Telecom Group, submit plans to close the gap between when crews dig up property and when they refill holes.
A letter he sent the contractors on July 28, two days before the letter to residents went out, suggested that the city could start withholding payments if the work isn't done to its satisfaction.
"We would meet with the contractors several times a week and that lag didn't seem to be improving, so we wanted ... a plan to see that it would improve," Baird said.
He also said the city was a long way from taking that measure.
Officials said they have no tally of complaints. Until the letter to residents went out last week, complaints landed in a number of city offices. Some homeowners complained directly to on-site inspectors, said Harry Glenn, a resident engineer for the Wastewater Department.
Glenn said he was aware, however, of between 10 and 15 complaints lodged daily. That number has not increased since the letter went out last week. Given the scope of the project - 113 miles of pipeline over 8,000 residences - some unhappy customers are to be expected, he said.
"If it's 10 percent, that's 800 complaints over a year's construction," Glenn said. "That sounds like a lot and it certainly is ... but I think it's just a matter of numbers."
Officials are hoping the letter to residents puts some fears to rest.
"Mostly people want reassurance that, yes, there's a hole in your yard, but it will be fixed," Glenn said.
- Kathryn Wexler can be reached at wexler@sptimes or 226-3383.
