Pat McCue says the FDOT lied to Gov. Bush. "They will have to kill me or vindicate me before this is over."
By JEAN HELLER
Published October 23, 2004
TAMPA - The executive director of the Tampa Hillsborough Expressway Authority said Friday that some top state officials, including the governor, might be planning to abolish his agency and turn its embattled elevated highway project over to someone new.
Pat McCue said Gov. Jeb Bush said recently that the Expressway Authority was told repeatedly by the state Department of Transportation that some of the foundations under the elevated lanes of the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway were set in unstable soil, yet the authority went ahead and built the project anyway.
"That is absolutely, blatantly false," McCue said. "It just didn't happen. FDOT lied to the governor, falsified information to him. Efforts are underway to abolish the Expressway Authority at a special session (of the Legislature). I could be charged with criminal negligence. They will have to kill me or vindicate me before this is over."
Bush's office said the governor has made no statements about abolishing the Expressway Authority, and state Sen. Jim Sebesta, R-St. Petersburg and chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, called the notion "highly unlikely" and one that he would not support.
Meanwhile Tom Logan, the regional director of URS Corp. which is the construction manager on the project, said if FDOT officials had concerns about the soils under and around the support columns for the elevated expressway, his company was never notified about them, either.
Friday's series of developments was the latest chapter in the storied troubles for a 7-mile, reversible roadway that was supposed to open next summer and bring relief for commuters between Tampa and Brandon. It is now unclear when the road will open, as one support column after another of the 220 beneath the bridge are found to have strength problems.
Jacob DiPietre, a spokesman for Bush, said the governor had recently made the statement that FDOT had done its job in reviewing the Crosstown project several years ago.
"He said there is written correspondence from the department to the Expressway Authority that (indicates) there were problems, but the Expressway Authority is independent and chose to ignore it," DiPietre said.
Bush apparently was referring to a series of memos written in 2001 by William N. Nickas, FDOT's chief structural engineer, to Ken Hartmann, FDOT secretary for District 7, which includes Hillsborough County. The memos raised concerns about five issues, two of which dealt with the weight of the bridge.
One of the five items said that the superstructure was 25 to 50 percent to heavy, which made it too expensive. The item did not raise any question of the weight being dangerous.
The other pertinent concern described "drilled shafts that at first glance seem heavily loaded for the region."
Logan said in an interview Friday that when his engineers explained to FDOT that there had to be "a lot of concrete" in the roadway because it was supporting three lanes of traffic, "the problem went away."
Asked about the question of heavy loads on the drilled shafts, Logan said the issue appeared to involve steel reinforcement of the shafts, not the soil conditions.
"Nowhere in there does it question the stability of the soil," he said. "That never came up. We never ignored anything. We took all those comments and resolved all of them."
When McCue was asked about the same item, he described it "as too nebulous to mean anything."
"We had no idea what FDOT was talking about with that one," he said.
Hartmann was out of his office Friday and could not be reached for comment.
While Sebesta said he doubted that the Expressway would come up in a special legislative session this year, he did think that the elevated Crosstown lanes have a serious public relations problem.
"I recently gave a speech to the West Shore Alliance, and there were about 250 people there," he said. "The Crosstown came up, and I asked for a show of hands on how many people had lost confidence in the project. I think about 75 percent of the hands went up."
Sebesta said he did not agree.
"I do have confidence in the project," he said. "Construction projects have problems all the time. You figure them out, fix them and move on."
When Sebesta was told of McCue's allegations of lies and coverups, he said, "This is just nutty."
McCue said that within the next week, he will have proof of the allegations he made against FDOT.
Amid all the controversy, Logan said URS would like to remain on the job as the construction manager of the project and see it through, although the Expressway Authority has asked the company to step out of its lead role.
"We've offered $2-million worth of retesting (of the support columns), and we will make good on anything for which we're found at fault," Logan said. "But the authority wants URS to commit to paying for all repairs in advance of any finding of fault. For us to agree to that now is to ask us to waive our insurance coverage, for which we pay tens of millions of dollars a year.
