Construction crews have been working to install new water pipes and sewers along York Avenue between East 61st and 63rd streets on the Upper East Side for more than eight years.
The project, which stretches over two blocks, is relatively small for a public work in New York City and was originally scheduled to take a year to complete. But it’s now seven years past that deadline, and officials say it won’t be finished until June 2025.
That’s nearly a decade of construction to build about 500 feet of sewer and water lines.
City engineers and architects say the delays point to the inefficient management of municipal infrastructure projects.
When crews first excavated the roadway to begin installing the new pipes, they unexpectedly found a maze of Con Edison gas and steam lines, according to Thomas Foley, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Design and Construction. The discovery forced engineers to send crews home to wait until the utilities were relocated, inflating the cost of the work from $8.5 million to an estimated $22.3 million.
Foley said the project’s issues could have been avoided if his agency was given more flexibility in soliciting bids from outside construction and engineering-design companies. He said bureaucracy and red tape prevented the department from including the work to relocate the Con Ed utilities in the project’s original construction plan.
“We needed to have them [utilities] at the design table with us, so that way we could plan accordingly and not plan when we have the large excavators, the Caterpillars, out in the street,” said Foley, who oversees capital construction projects in the city, ranging from work on courthouses to flood barriers.
“Bad construction is a choice,” he added.
Foley joined other city officials on Wednesday at a rally on the steps of City Hall to call for state lawmakers to pass reforms to help expedite public works projects like the beleaguered one on York Avenue. They said the Department of Design and Construction should be turned into a public authority like the MTA, which would allow it to green-light construction contracts without lawmakers’ approval and make its own rules and procedures.
They also criticized the city’s current contracting process, which they said makes collaboration among utility companies, designers and builders difficult.
Under state law, city officials have a mandate to manage most municipal construction projects that cost less than $10 million through a procurement method called “design-bid-build.” The rule means Foley’s team must first bid out a contract for a company to design a project. City officials must wait for that process to finish before separately soliciting for a construction company that has never overseen the project to physically perform the work.
Alison Landry, chief infrastructure officer in the Office of the Deputy Mayor of Operations, said isolating the contract’s two phases inflates construction costs and extends timelines because the designer and the builder aren’t working together from the get-go.
“If you were going to renovate your apartment, if you did design and then waited a year to have a contractor get on board, you might not have the same materials that the designer had specified,” Landry said. “When we do design-bid-build, those team members aren’t able to talk to each other.”
Critics say the design-bid-build contracting method is used like a blunt tool that causes problems with complicated projects. Issues like the utility lines beneath York Avenue are often discovered only after construction begins. And when those obstacles are identified while work is already underway, the city is required to negotiate changes to its contracts with private companies, sparking delays and cost overruns.
City officials instead want to be allowed to choose from different contract types, including a process called “design-build,” which requires engineering-design and construction firms to plan projects under a single contract from the outset. Foley argues that the technique helps prevent potential problems before they occur.
In 2019, state lawmakers required the MTA to use design-build contracting for most of its construction projects and allowed the city to use it for work costing more than $10 million. But Foley and other city officials want lawmakers to let them to use design-build, along with a variety of other contracting methods, for any municipal construction project.
He said the use of design-build techniques has already saved the city $2 million on a project to construct the new Shirley Chisholm Recreational Center in East Flatbush, which broke ground last year.
“It’s one thing to be sitting down in a vacuum in a silo, at a design table, and then to bid out that project,” Foley said. “We’re changing the fabric of the city literally as we speak, and these are very, very complex projects, and the teams need to be working together from the onset of the project.”
He added that contracting reforms will help the city execute its biggest projects, such as the multibillion-dollar effort to protect Lower Manhattan against rising sea levels and flooding as climate change intensifies.
“The scale and complexity of doing coastal resilience and stormwater management work means we’re finding things — even with sophisticated geotechnical investigations, we’re not always able to understand exactly what we’re going to find when we get in the field,” said Landry from the deputy mayor’s office.
City officials plan to go to Albany on May 13 to urge state lawmakers to pass their proposed contracting reforms.