The two contractors left to vie for the Tampa Bay Water job will start testing repairs in June.
By CRAIG PITTMAN
Published April 20, 2004
CLEARWATER - One of the three contractors vying for the job of fixing Tampa Bay Water's troubled desalination plant has dropped out of the competition. But the other two are slated to begin pilot testing their repair ideas in mid June.
The Apollo Beach plant was supposed to be finished in January 2003. But its builder went bankrupt, and its filter system likely is not working properly. Now it may be 2005 or later before it is cleared for regular operation.
The utility had lined up three consortiums to propose repairs for the plant, which is supposed to be producing 25-million gallons of fresh water a day, and also vie for the contract to operate it.
Tampa Bay Water agreed to pay each of the three $100,000 to conduct pilot tests of their proposed fixes. The utility board decides in August who gets the job.
Two of the three said the repairs are likely to cost in the neighborhood of $8-million to $14-million. The third predicted it could cost up to $20-million.
That higher prediction came from the team of Ionics and Montgomery Watson Harza, both U.S.-owned companies, that have "built more plants than any of our competitors," Ionics executive Ark Pang told the utility board. Pang said his team had spotted so many fixes that he predicted the cost would be another $5-million to $6-million higher than the estimates of the other two teams: American Water Services, a German-owned company, and its Spanish sister company Pridesa; and French-owned Veolia Water, formerly U.S. Filter.
But now the Ionics team has backed out of the competition, said Tampa Bay Water engineering manager Ken Herd. He said they objected to the fact that half the criteria for selecting a winner would be based on cost. The other half will be based on the technical aspects of the proposed fix.
Desal's woes have not hurt the man in charge of the utility's day-to-day operations, general manager Jerry Maxwell. Tampa Bay Water's board gave Maxwell high marks in his annual evaluation and voted Monday to raise his $167,000 annual salary by more than 5.6 percent, to about $176,000.
