TAMPA — City Hall is being sued by the company it hired for a $3.2 million canal-repair project that ran into problems, plaguing neighborhoods along West Shore Boulevard with road closures and traffic delays even as its cost rose by 45 percent.
Pac Comm, based in Miami, filed the lawsuit in Hillsborough Circuit Court this week, seeking damages of more than $15,000.
The project's goal was to ease storm-driven flooding by expanding the Watrous Canal's ability to move stormwater from South Tampa to the bay. The work included repairing eroded banks along the canal and replacing a box culvert at West Shore Boulevard, which carries an average of 28,000 cars and trucks a day.
But the project was delayed twice even before it began in 2016, and soon ran into more problems, according to the lawsuit.
Pac Comm contends the city didn't design or oversee the project properly in a variety of ways: It failed to investigate soil conditions. It didn't ensure that it had good designs for box culverts and retaining walls. It had to change the height of the walls and the slope of the banks. It required drainage systems to be installed within 5 feet of the walls.
The result, Pac Comm says, was at least 34 changes to the plan.
On Friday, city officials declined to comment on the allegations. City Attorney Salvatore Territo said he wasn't certain the city had even received a copy of the lawsuit.
City director of contract administration Michael Chucran also declined to respond to the suit's allegations, but did discuss the status of the project.
Pac Comm was first scheduled to complete the project in July 2016, but was not substantially complete until July 14, 2017, about a year behind schedule. The project originally was expected to require about 2 feet of excavation, but it turned out that 8 or 10 feet were actually required. That required more shoring up of the canal banks as well as more time and money. Two change orders added $1.48 million to the cost, resulting in a final cost of about $4.7 million.
"It was just a complete mess," said Culbreath Bayou resident Richard Davison, 66, who occasionally would talk to workers and learn that plans for the project had changed. Two of the three entrances to his neighborhood were partially or completely blocked, making it harder to come and go. And in June 2016, he said, workers blocked the canal to bring in some equipment but didn't unblock it when a storm arrived.
When he woke up the next morning, there were 2 to 3 inches of water in his home. He and his 95-year-old mother, Barbara Davidson, had to spend months living in a hotel while workers made repairs and replaced drywall throughout their home.
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Explore all your optionsThree homes flooded, Chucran said, two badly enough that the families had to move out during repairs.
Davidson said his family had lived next to the canal for more than 50 years, but before the project began they had never flooded before.
Contact Richard Danielson at rdanielson@tampabay.com or (813) 226-3403. Follow @Danielson_Times