The Portland Water Bureau says the $138 million project to build a new Powell Butte reservoir is on budget and will be done on time, despite the discovery of approximately 3,200 cracks.

“This is a large concrete structure,” said Tim Hall, public information officer for the city. “Consequently, there were (more) cracks … than expected.”

Corona, Calif.-based SSC Construction is the general contractor for the project. Divers found the cracks when the reservoir was filled. Crews then began filling the cracks with an epoxy grout sealant.

The project’s design budget previously increased from $8.5 million to $12.3 million, following various land use, permitting and construction management issues, according to the bureau. The construction budget has increased from $80 million to $82.2 million because of additions, Hall said. Other costs include construction of a permanent caretaker’s house, a maintenance facility for Portland Parks & Recreation and an interpretive center, he said. Additional change orders could drive up the price higher, he said.

“We believe that the project is going to come in under budget,” he said. “Our expectation is that they will submit the project according to their bid.”

SSC Construction is about two months behind schedule, but the 50-million-gallon reservoir is expected to be ready for service by late summer, Hall said. That will allow the city to disconnect the Mount Tabor reservoir and transfer water into the Powell Butte one before a December 2015 deadline.

Installation of a large underground pipe and valve vault began at Southeast 162nd Avenue and Division Street last week. Work will wrap up by September, according to the bureau.

A 25-million-gallon reservoir at Kelly Butte, meanwhile, is ready to go online by next year, according to Hall. Hoffman Construction is building the $90 million Kelly Butte reservoir.

“We have to have the two reservoirs ready to go to replace the storage needs that we currently have at Mount Tabor,” he said. “Storage from (Portland’s) east side will come from Powell Butte and Kelly Butte.”

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Construction is ramping up for the second phase of the Portland Water Bureau’s $138 million project at Powell Butte Nature Park – so much so that neighbors are wondering whether the noise will interrupt their nights.

With three buildings under construction now and work on the 50 million-gallon buried reservoir set to begin soon, the peaceful east Portland neighborhood is seeing a surge in action. Construction equipment will start overtaking the public parking areas this week, and the pace of work will continue to intensify in summer months.

“In the next month or two, it will be like a pile of fire ants out there,” said Jim Hall, senior project manager for , the project’s general contractor.

In fact, the Corona, Calif.-based company in February applied for a noise variance to enable crews to work any time – day or night – for the next year, even though 24/7 work was never on the agenda.

Crews will soon begin an intricate sequence of concrete pours that will require a firm timeline and later working hours. In an effort to streamline the paperwork, SSC applied for the most flexible noise variance. But the language of the request caused some anxiety for residents surrounding the butte.

“When I heard they wanted to operate 24 hours, I was concerned about the noise – not so much during the day, but in the middle of the night,” said Tom Lewis, chairman of the . The Centennial neighborhood abuts the park.

The water bureau does not support the blanket variance, however, and SSC has since clarified its original request. The details are still being finalized, but standard limitations will exist for permitted night work, according to the city’s noise control officer, Paul van Orden.

“At first they wanted to use a rock crusher in the middle of the night, which from 20 years of experience, I knew would not be a wise thing to approve,” he said. “But the work we do approve should be pretty innocuous for the neighbors.”

Crews have already started building a maintenance facility, a interpretive center and a caretaker’s house. While green building certifications aren’t being targeted, Hall emphasized that sustainable measures will be taken where possible. For instance, all of the wood is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, he said.

The buildings’ costs have drawn some criticism, however. When City Council approved the $80 million construction contract with SSC last May, Commissioner Amanda Fritz and others raised concerns about the interpretive center and custom home, which together increased project costs by more than $1 million.

But Teresa Elliott, project manager for the water bureau, emphasized that the home is necessary to meet land use requirements and that construction contracts went to the lowest bidders.

The bulk of the $15 million being spent this year will go toward construction of the concrete reservoir, pipes and vaults. Because of strict temperature and sequencing requirements, the 40-foot-by-40-foot concrete squares must be poured during cooler morning hours and done in a checkerboard pattern so that segments can dry without touching fresh concrete.

The reservoir, which is Powell Butte’s second, and a planned 25 million-gallon Kelly Butte reservoir are necessary to meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency orders that the city replace its five uncovered reservoirs.

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There’s a lull in construction on Powell Butte, but things should pick up again soon. The Water Bureau’s largest construction project – for a few years, anyway – is the addition of a new 50 million-gallon reservoir in Powell Butte Nature Park. The next phase, which will be completed by Corona, Calif.-based contractor SSC Construction, will kick off later this month.

SSC is in the process of preparing a plan for involving DMWESB subcontractors in the $80 million project, said water bureau spokesman Tim Hall.

The new reservoir is part of a larger $138 million project that is fulfilling a 1995 master plan for the site. The water bureau has been able to continue its planned construction projects during down economic times. The $138 million Powell Butte reservoir project is being paid for by a city stimulus package passed in 2009.

With so little other work in town, there has been a lot of competition for the water bureau’s projects, according to Teresa Elliot, principal engineer for the Powell Butte project.

“There are a lot of contractors vying for this work,” she said.

The first phase of the project involved digging out hundreds of tons of soil to make room for the underground reservoir.

SSC crews should start work on Powell Butte later this month with some additional excavation – the hole for the reservoir still needs to be 15 feet deeper. The project is on track to have a new reservoir ready and on-line in 2013, Elliot said.

SSC’s work will include constructing the new reservoir and its connecting pipelines, valves, large vaults, and electrical and instrument improvements.

Additional construction on Powell Butte, including some mitigation measures, is coming up. Work on a new interpretive center and a caretaker’s house is about a year out, Elliot said. The final phase of the project will include trail improvements and new landscaping.

The biggest challenge for the project has been a logistical one.

“This construction is being done in a park that’s open at all times,” Elliott said. “We have to move park users around the perimeters of the construction site so they can continue to enjoy the park and not worry about accidents between them and the contractors.”

The Powell Butte project is the largest project that the water bureau will manage for the next two years, Elliot said, but there is more work to be had in the future. The water bureau’s next project will be the construction of a 25 million-gallon Kelly Butte reservoir; work on that should begin next summer, Elliott said. There are also some surface draining improvements that could be done on an older reservoir at Powell Butte, but plans for those aren’t yet final.

Both of these replacements aim at creating new reservoir capacity, both to accommodate population grown and so that the city’s five uncovered reservoirs can be taken offline. The Environmental Protection Agency said it would require the replacement of the uncovered reservoirs early last year, and Portland’s final request for variance was refused earlier this summer.

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Linda Bauer just wants assurance that if something were to go wrong with the Portland Water Bureau‘s $138 million Powell Butte project, then residents in the area would be warned.

Portland City Council last week rejected an appeal from Bauer and the committee she chairs, the East Portland Neighborhood Organization Land Use and Transportation Committee. The appeal claimed that the city didn’t take proper action last year when it amended its 2003 Powell Butte Master Plan. But while the council dismissed Bauer’s claim that the city used the wrong approach, it did agree that no resident should feel unsafe as a result of a city project. As such, it is requiring that the city include an emergency response plan before going forward with the project.

In 2003 – after 13 years of work – the Portland Water Bureau approved a plan for a new, 50 million-gallon covered water reservoir at Powell Butte to meet growing demand. The bureau also worked into the document plans for an improved biking/walking trail system, a new caretaker’s house, a new interpretative center and vegetation improvements.

After going through the public process and planning the project, the bureau decided in October 2010 to amend the plan to take into account the new information. The amendments focused mostly on logistical changes, like adding bio-swales for storm-water runoff and changing the tree removal plan because specific sites had been refined.

But Bauer’s major concern was with what was left out: a system to notify residents in case of a major flood event. She contended that the city charter requires the project team to make emergency preparations, but city staffers rebutted that it wouldn’t make sense, or be effective, to plan for such a drastic event.

In the approval of the amended document, the land-use hearings officer stated, “A 1,000-year storm event, in staff’s opinion, is such potential magnitude that the event could potentially overwhelm any carefully engineered system that meets all regulator requirements. Therefore, staff disagrees with the argument the proposed storm-water system is not safe.”

Bauer believes that just because a 1,000-year event – which Commissioner Randy Leonard noted could lead to flooding as high as 400 feet – could potentially be catastrophic doesn’t mean the city should ignore it. She also pointed out that a storm isn’t the only event that could cause flooding. A terrorist attack or accident could likely have similar effects, she said.

“An event like that may overwhelm any system meant to safeguard the neighbors, but with some sort of a plan set up to provide as much advanced notice as possible we could at the very least keep the loss of life to a minimum.”

City staffers and the project team argued that even though they understood the concern for safety, the project, and the 50 million additional gallons of water stored there, wouldn’t add more risk of flooding. According to Tim Brooks, a consultant hired to help with the plan, the project will actually reduce risk because the additional reservoir could hold water in the case of a flood.

“The emergency overflow system and pile already exist on this site and the new reservoir will just get hooked up to it,” he said. “If anything, this just adds more storage.”

But even though the likelihood of a 1,000-year storm event is far-fetched, City Council agreed that the city should take time to make sure residents feel comfortable.

“While engineering for such an event may be unfeasible, the safety issue needs to be addressed in the record and it needs to be addressed on a wider scope than just this plan.”

Mayor Sam Adams agreed, noting that the city is required to provide citizens with options in cases of emergency.

City Council rejected the appeal, but with a caveat. It said the Water Bureau could go forward with the project if it met a few conditions of approval, including one related to safety.

The city is requiring the Office of Emergency Management to start working out an agreement between the city and landowners along Johnson Creek about how to address emergency concerns. The agency will focus on signing on citizens to the city’s new emergency response system, which can notify residents of threats in as many as five different ways.

“We all need drinking water, so we were never trying to stop this project,” Bauer said. “But we need to make sure that (the city is) providing that drinking water as safely as possible.

“We needed that security from the city and I now believe we are going to get it.”

The city approved the plan preliminarily last week. City Council will take a final vote on the plan during its Feb. 16 meeting.

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I found via . A local activist arranged a visit to the Portland Water Bureau to look through public documents. Stephanie Stewart, land-use co-chair with the Mt. Tabor Neighborhood Association, was trying to find information related to the contract that was recently awarded for the design of Powell Butte Reservoir No. 3. The bureau charged her $2 for eight copies and $55.72 for two hours of “supervision.”

The “supervision” is apparently a matter of city policy, the blogger says she was told by Jimmy Brown, community involvement and information manager at the water bureau.

But what’s more interesting is what Stewart found about the review panel for the reservoir project:

• The seven panel members were as follows: 1) Jerry More, PWB; 2) Michael Angerinos, PWB Citizen, 3) Crystal Yezman, PWB, 4) Stan VandeBergh, PWB, 5) George Lozovoy, Parks Bureau, 6) Tamra Dickson, citizen, 7) Teresa Elliot, PWB. Notice that PWB does not seem to be following the City Auditor’s report on consultant contracts, which advises against loading bid review panels with Bureau staff.
  
• I learned that the panel members saw 2 bids: one from CH2MHill for $5,586,884; the other from Tetra Tech for $8,683,882. That’s a $3million difference, and the panel favored CH2MHill. But, before the contract was signed and presumably after the panel’s review, CH2MHill raised their bid to $8,455,246.

So she alleges first that the water bureau had staff on the review panel and second, the contract winner raised its bid after review.

I called Stewart to see what’s up. I’m also interested to know why her association is interested in the Powell Butte project, other than the thrill of tangling with the water bureau. A reporter and I are also playing phone tag with Jimmy Brown. Jimmy Brown said the supervision policy has been in practice for a while.

The post Fishiness at the water bureau appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

I found via . A local activist arranged a visit to the Portland Water Bureau to look through public documents. Stephanie Stewart, land-use co-chair with the Mt. Tabor Neighborhood Association, was trying to find information related to the contract that was recently awarded for the design of Powell Butte Reservoir No. 3. The bureau charged her $2 for eight copies and $55.72 for two hours of “supervision.”

The “supervision” is apparently a matter of city policy, the blogger says she was told by Jimmy Brown, community involvement and information manager at the water bureau.

But what’s more interesting is what Stewart found about the review panel for the reservoir project:

• The seven panel members were as follows: 1) Jerry More, PWB; 2) Michael Angerinos, PWB Citizen, 3) Crystal Yezman, PWB, 4) Stan VandeBergh, PWB, 5) George Lozovoy, Parks Bureau, 6) Tamra Dickson, citizen, 7) Teresa Elliot, PWB. Notice that PWB does not seem to be following the City Auditor’s report on consultant contracts, which advises against loading bid review panels with Bureau staff.
  
• I learned that the panel members saw 2 bids: one from CH2MHill for $5,586,884; the other from Tetra Tech for $8,683,882. That’s a $3million difference, and the panel favored CH2MHill. But, before the contract was signed and presumably after the panel’s review, CH2MHill raised their bid to $8,455,246.

So she alleges first that the water bureau had staff on the review panel and second, the contract winner raised its bid after review.

I called Stewart to see what’s up. I’m also interested to know why her association is interested in the Powell Butte project, other than the thrill of tangling with the water bureau. A reporter and I are also playing phone tag with Jimmy Brown. Jimmy Brown said the supervision policy has been in practice for a while.

The post Fishiness at the water bureau appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

A city bureau with some of the largest projects in Portland’s local “Job Creation and Stimulus Package” won’t be building those projects anytime soon. The Portland Water Bureau, with stimulus projects totaling $130 million, has no set plans to begin construction on $120 million worth of the projects on that list.

The Water Bureau is speeding up important capital projects to get more people working than it would in a typical year, said city Commissioner Randy Leonard, who oversees the bureau. It’s just not working off the list that was announced in early 2009, when the package was unveiled.

The city’s stimulus package, separate from federal and state efforts, contained $503 million in capital projects designed to put people to work over the 12 months from January 2009 to 2010. It identified projects in five city bureaus and the Office of Emergency Management.

But that list never reflected the projects for which Leonard wanted to speed up construction spending, he said. In fact, some of the official stimulus projects actually were put on hold so other projects could move ahead faster, he said.

Leonard characterized the discussions a year ago with then-Mayor-elect Sam Adams on the stimulus package as informal in nature. “Sam said ‘Identify projects you can move up,’ and the first thing that came to my mind was Powell Butte.”

That $138 million project to build a 50 million-gallon underground reservoir at Powell Butte, never made the official stimulus list. To Leonard, though, the project is the heart of the Water Bureau’s stimulus efforts.

“Sam asked, ‘What can you do?’ and I said, ‘I can do a lot.’ And we did.”

Construction at Powell Butte started over the summer, thanks in part to efforts to speed up the project, Leonard said. To do that, however, Leonard had to put other planned projects on hold.

That included replacing the Water Bureau’s decrepit Interstate Maintenance Building. At an estimated $55 million, that project is the largest in the stimulus package, itself worth more than a tenth of the package’s announced $503 million value.

“When I made those decisions, it wasn’t without consequence,” Leonard said. “It’s bad for (bureau) morale. People are saying ‘How could this happen? We were counting on at least having a decent workplace.’

“But that project was nowhere near ready,” Leonard said, so the money shifted to Powell Butte, a project that was both more pressing and ready to begin construction. A federal Environmental Protection Agency mandate to replace the city’s open reservoirs gives that project added urgency.

The $50 million project to install automated water meters for all of Portland’s 178,000 customers won’t get started in the foreseeable future, Leonard said, nor will the $10 million watershed roads and bridges reconstruction project. Both are included in the city’s stimulus package.

Leonard said he’s not sure how those projects made the list. “If I had known some inquisitive reporter from the Daily Journal of Commerce would be sitting here asking me these questions, I would have paid closer attention to what got on that list,” he said.

Other than his discussions with Adams, their respective offices haven’t talked much about the city stimulus package. “We’re in our silos,” he said.

Council never met again to discussed changing the terms of the package, Leonard said. He said he plans to focus on Powell Butte and speed along other reservoirs at Kelly Butte and then Washington Park, neither of which made the stimulus package list.

Even if the Water Bureau’s $10 million work tied with the eastside Portland Streetcar expansion proceeds, the other bureau projects on the stimulus list, worth an estimated $120 million, won’t start in the next year. That means projects representing nearly 24 percent of the package’s total value won’t start construction in the timeframe announced at the stimulus package unveiling last January, without even counting the stalled projects in other bureaus.

In Leonard’s assessment, the Water Bureau is meeting the goals of the stimulus, if not the letter of the document. “There are planners, engineers, architects, and a number of people employed who would not be employed otherwise,” he said. “We’re spending money we otherwise would not have spent if not for the mayor’s request.”

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Nutter Corp., based in Vancouver, Wash, has been selected to perform the first phase of work on a massive new reservoir in Southeast Portland. Nutter received notice of intent to award the contract for site work on Powell Butte Reservoir No. 2.

The contract will be executed around the end of this month, said Kathleen Brene-Morus, contract administrator with the city of Portland. Nutter bid $3.7 million for the project.

“This job is essentially doing the mass grading work for the construction,” said Todd Cahill, project manager with Nutter. “It’s basically, in layman’s terms, digging a giant hole.”

Portland Water Bureau Director David Shaff told the Daily Journal of Commerce in April that the excavation work would take six to eight months and require 100 dump-truck trips each day.

The project’s second phase will involve construction of a 50-million-gallon reservoir on the butte, next to an existing 50-million-gallon reservoir completed in 1980. The project is estimated to cost $138 million.

Portland in 1925 bought Powell Butte, now a popular park, to use for reservoirs. Reservoir No. 2 was labeled in 1996 as a critical project for the city to meet water needs, Shaff said.

The existing reservoir needs seismic improvements, but those can’t begin until the new reservoir comes online. The seismic repairs would require the existing reservoir to be taken offline for three years.

Reservoir No. 2 is scheduled to go online in 2013.

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Excavation will begin this summer on a Powell Butte reservoir project that city officials say will create 1,500 jobs over the next three to four years.

The city is planning to release a request for proposals for the reservoir project, likely later this month. The approximate cost is $138 million.

The new 50 million-gallon reservoir will be adjacent to another 50 million-gallon underground reservoir on the butte. The existing reservoir was built in 1979 and 1980, and came online in 1981.

Tim Hall, senior community outreach coordinator for the , said the city could add another two 50 million-gallon reservoirs and one 20 million-gallon reservoir in the future “as the city grows and the need for more water storage becomes apparent.”

The excavation for the currently planned reservoir should require six to eight months and involve 100 dump-truck trips each day, according to David Shaff, director of the Portland Water Bureau.

He said the project will be done in two phases. The first phase includes excavation, access road improvements, trail relocation, temporary parking lots and tree removal. Phase two of construction, slated to begin in summer of 2010, includes reservoir construction, piping, emergency overflow pipe and structure, relocation of a caretaker house, a new interpretive center and trail improvements.

The project will also include landscaping, tree replacement and storm water improvements. The cost of the first phase of construction is estimated at $13 million.

The first phase has been designed by the Portland Water Bureau, but Shaff said the second phase will require more specialized structural design.

The city purchased Powell Butte in 1925 for the sole purpose of using it for reservoirs. The four reservoirs are part of a master plan completed in 1985. The currently planned reservoir was identified in 1996 as a “critical project” for the city to meet water needs, according to Shaff. The existing reservoir, he added, needs to be seismically upgraded, but the work cannot be done until the second reservoir is operational in 2013.

The city is attempting to get “legislative relief” from the U.S. Congress regarding its use of open reservoirs, Shaff said. Relief would mean the city would not have to cover the reservoirs or build a new treatment plant. However, he said, “the Powell Butte project would still need to be done so that Reservoir No. 1 (the existing Powell Butte reservoir) can be taken off-line for three years while the seismic retrofitting is done.”

A community meeting will be held at 10 a.m. on April 11 at Glencoe Elementary School, at 825 S.E. 51st Ave. Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard and staff members from U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer’s and Sen. Jeff Merkley’s offices are scheduled to attend.

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