Growing Underground

City of Cape Coral Undergoing $458 Million Utilities Expansion Program

By Scott Judy

As the building boom in Southwest Florida continues at a breakneck pace, the demands on the area's communities to keep their underground infrastructure systems up-to-speed are becoming increasingly intense.

The city of Cape Coral's approach is an especially ambitious one. The city is currently undertaking a seven-year, roughly $458 million initiative to expand its utility distribution system and also construct new facilities. Broomfield, Colo.-based water and wastewater specialist MWH Constructors is engineering and overseeing the city's efforts through a program manager-at-risk contract.

The contract commenced in September 2004 and will run for an estimated seven years. This latest contract succeeds a previous five-year utility extension program, under which MWH delivered more than 400 mi. of installed piping and 100 mi. of new roads.

Overall, the effort is aimed at meeting the city's water infrastructure needs through the projected build-out of the community, expected roughly 10 years from now.

"The growth in our area has exceeded all expectations," said Chuck Pavlos, director of public works for Cape Coral. He said actual growth has far surpassed the figures generated by numerous, yearly growth projections.

"We had growth projections in our master plan, then we updated those with newer data, and then we hired a consultant who updated those growth projections, and we busted all of those," he said. "Nobody expected the growth that we're seeing."

Pavlos added that the city is regularly experiencing new monthly records for single-family home permits, with approximately 8,000 generated in 2004.

"They're eating up (our) capacity every day," he said.

UEP

The project is broken up in roughly halves between an expansion of the city's distribution system, referred to as the Utilities Extension Program, as well as the Facilities Expansion Program.

The UEP extends Cape Coral's collection and distribution lines to areas currently served by groundwater wells and septic tanks. This includes the extension of roughly 100 mi. of new utility piping per year.

"We're extending water, irrigation (reuse water), gravity sewer, associated pump stations and force mains," said Larry Laws, program manager for MWH. A small amount of storm drain improvement is also included. Reconstruction of the disturbed roads is also included in MWH's contract.

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The company is utilizing a prequalified group of five underground utility contractors to handle the UEP work, which is divided up into five segments. Each individual segment is further broken down into a number of subcontract areas, which are then competitively bid to the group of prequalified firms. These firms include: Denco Construction, Forsberg Construction, Guymann Construction of Florida, Southwest Utility Systems and Westra Construction.

"For instance, the Southeast 1 project is broken up into six different subcontract areas," Laws said. "There are six subcontracts in play under that one project."

The $47.8 million Southeast 1 contract, the first of the five projects, began construction in spring 2005 and continues for roughly a year. The remaining four utility extension areas will follow sequentially. Once Southeast 1 is completed, the next segment up is Southwest 4, which will then be followed by Southwest 5, Southwest 6 and Southwest 7, in that order.

Laws added that each of the five contracts will "get a little bigger" as the group moves forward through the program.

"It's MWH's responsibility to coordinate the different contractors, to make sure they don't have the roads torn up at the same time and that sort of thing, and that the work is properly planned and sequenced," Laws said. "We typically break it up into gravity sewer collection areas/pump station areas, so a contractor has total responsibility for a particular service/pump station area."

FEP

Meanwhile, the Facilities Expansion Program, or FEP, includes the approximate doubling of capacity at two existing water-reclamation facilities, the addition of approximately 4 MGD of capacity at the existing reverse-osmosis water plant, construction of a new wastewater plant and also a new 12 MGD reverse-osmosis water plant that is expandable to 36 MGD.

Contractors currently at work on FEP projects include: Parkson Corp. of Fort Lauderdale; Cardinal Contractors, Sarasota; Cogburn Electrical of Jacksonville; Boyd Irrigation of Bokeelia, Fla.; Raymond Inc. of Marietta, Ga.; and Mitchell & Stark of Naples.

Unlike the UEP, where the construction teams will progress from one contract to the next in sequential order, the FEP will feature multiple contracts being built simultaneously.

"There will be a lot overlapping work, going on in different geographic locations," Laws said. He added that the expansions of the two existing treatment plants will occur simultaneously, as well as the construction of a new plant in the northern portion of town.

Installation of interconnecting pipelines that tie those plants together is also included in the FEP, as is the drilling of about 20 water production wells to approximately double the city's number.

PM-At-Risk

Cape Coral's decision to use the alternative-delivery method of program manager-at-risk stems from the city's past history of bad results. An infrastructure program undertaken during the 1990s, utilizing the traditional design-bid-build method, resulted mostly in bad feelings.

"We ended up with a bunch of lawsuits at the end of that," Pavlos said. "You had the city, the contractor, the designer, the construction manager, everybody pointing fingers at everybody else."

Before moving forward with the current program, Pavlos said city officials asked themselves questions such as, "How do we control the construction better?" and "How do we not tear up the whole city and have it torn up for nine months?" (In the previous effort, residents experienced this unacceptable situation.)

This time around, the city wanted to limit its risk of lawsuits, establish a single point of responsibility and also address issues of quality.

Pavlos said the program manager-at-risk approach "takes the best parts of design-build and construction manager-at-risk and creates a hybrid. It gives us a lot of flexibility, certainty and control."

The city sees an advantage to having MWH manage both the UEP and FEP.

"Giving them both programs forces them to coordinate it so we don't get too far in front on the distribution and collection expansion where the plants can't handle it," Pavlos said.

With the extreme amount of other construction going on in Southwest Florida, as well as in other areas, a major challenge facing MWH will be attracting competitive bids from contractors and subcontractors.

"We can always use more qualified contractors to keep the competitive juices flowing," Laws said. "The bidding environment is very tough right now. There's so many other things going on."

Useful Source:

http://www.capecoralutilityexpansion.com/default.asp