The engineers for Fredonia’s water project refused to take any blame this week for a design mishap, as village trustees often angrily disagreed.

Mike Manning and Lori Reed from Ramboll, also known as OBG, appeared at a workshop of the trustees Monday to give updates and listen to concerns about a ring for a clarifier that didn’t fit the equipment. The issue has caused a significant delay in Fredonia’s long-running water project, which was supposed to be finished this week.

“There is a lot of miscommunication that took place and some things were misunderstood along the way,” said Manning, beginning a discussion that ran over an hour and was often highly technical.

He said the water clarifier that took the disputed ring, which was quickly removed, is “running fine, doing what it’s supposed to be doing.” The second clarifier still must be worked on, and that could take about 10 weeks.

Manning said project contractors Kandey Co. and Ahlstrom-Shafer are “ready to finish out this job for the village. What’s holding them back at this point is authorization for Kandey to move forward on the ring for clarifier No. 1. There’s money within the unit price contingency items. This is money that is in the project, it’s there to use and it’s available. The amount is $5,265.” He went on to say that although Ramboll doesn’t feel they need board approval for that, he mentioned it “to be forthright in the discussion.”

Soon after, Trustee James Lynden said to Manning, “Right now, although you say it’s operating sufficiently, it does seem according to what I spoke to the plant supervisor (Chris Surma), it is operating at limited operational parameters… There was a statement you made that was kind of perplexing. It was that Fredonia provided Ramboll with the fabrication drawings from existing clarifiers and these drawings are the only known record of the installed equipment… if you’d been to the plant you’d clearly see there was a difference there.”

Lynden added that Manning was wrong when he said, in a letter, that the rings were not an integral part of the treatment plant work. “If somebody isn’t really eying (the clarifier), it’s gonna cause a problem. And it did cause a problem.”

Manning said, “I don’t know if any of you have ever been through a (clarifier) start-up like this before, but something always happens. This time, fortunate for us, we found this issue out when demand is low … so that really there was no disruption to customers.”

See ENGINEERS, Page A5

“The fear is now to manage the system of eliminating the scum and clearing the troughs the way it was anticipated to be done,” Lynden replied. “If somebody isn’t watching that with a hawkeye now, we’re going to have major problems, just like it did initially when you first started it up. To prevent those problems, we need to have a safe and secure system. We can’t have somebody just step away or look away for two seconds and have this thing cause a problem and it shouldn’t be the issue of the village.

“We agreed to a contract to provide a system that would work safely and efficiently. You’ve got the efficiently part, apparently, but the safely part…” he continued. Lynden reiterated his stance that the village shouldn’t be paying for the work Ramboll is requesting, and also again complained about the time extensions added to a project that still isn’t done. He said the village agreed to a $31,000 penalty to get the extension in place.

“The most substantial portion of the entire project is the clarifiers and the second one isn’t going to even be started…I feel the village should be receiving $1,000 a day until the project is substantially complete and operating properly. Essentially, you’re basically giving us our money back that was penalized us for extending the contract, ” he said.

“We expected an exact replica that would work the way we always worked it,” Trustee EvaDawn Bashaw said. “That’s what the original discussion was about. We didn’t get an exact replica, and now that it has to be adjusted, it kind of hurts to think that we have to pay additional to get the exact replica.”

“They understood the project going in,” Lynden said. “When you clean out the clarifying tank… over a number of years there is stuff in there and there’s going to be some issues that as, an engineering company, you should know this going into a retrofit.”

Manning said that surprises are why a contingency fund is in the contract. He also explained the difference between change orders, which are added as additional costs to a contract, and field changes, which get funded from the contractual contingency fund.

“We really recommend you move forward on clarifier No. 1. The rest we can sort out later,” he said.

Trustee Roger Britz questioned Reed on how she reviewed drawings and specifications for the project. Reed, like Manning, said no one clued her in on Fredonia’s apparently unique water clarifying process.

“Maybe, during 1965, they realized there was an issue and they modified the system without updating the blueprints,” Britz said. “As engineers, wouldn’t you kind of take the two and look at them and say, ‘here’s the plans from 1965 and that doesn’t look like it’.

“There is an obvious error there and I do believe it’s a design flaw and I’m going to put blame on the engineers. I don’t feel the village should pay for some modification that should be accounted for during the drawing process,” he added. “I’m just not buying your story, I’m sorry.”

“We’re talking less than 1 percent (of the project), $11,000 for these two rings,” Manning said, apparently also referring to the ring for clarifier No. 2.

Britz said that if Ramboll still wanted to work with the village, it should “pony up.” Lynden said Manning was “giving us the runaround” because although it is the village’s decision to get the contractors back to work, it will also have to pay them for the work which should have been done correctly in the first place.

“It’s a shame that it’s come to this, quite frankly,” Lynden said. “The idea that we’ve had to do this in public is, I think, terrible.”

“We have the funds available to pay the contractor, get the project moving, then our legal team is going to have a long, lengthy discussion with (Ramboll). I think that’s what should happen,” Britz said.

The trustees took Britz’s suggestion, verbally agreeing to move the work on clarifier No. 1 forward while promising that their legal team will help settle any disputes with the engineers.