Midway Road Construction Estimate in 2011
The City Manager doesn’t make engineering estimates on projects. The Town hires professional engineers to make those estimates and the engineers do their best to project into the future what unit cost might be for concrete and steel and other building materials and the cost of construction. The vast majority of the time they are pretty accurate, but sometimes the economy surges on them and causes the cost to be significantly higher. The engineer doesn’t know at the time of estimate if the city will build the project in three years or in six to ten years. Often cities decide to wait to build projects until the economy cools off if construction prices are running higher than their estimate. Sometimes they will go back to the public and ask for additional funding or they will re-engineer the project to fit the available funding.
The Midway Road reconstruction is one such project. The estimate for construction came from Guymon Phillips a registered professional engineer in Texas. Guymon was working with the bond committee back in 2011 to try to develop the scope for a project on Midway Road and some estimated cost. There were a lot of unknown variables for the project at the time. Obviously the project had not been designed. Cities generally don’t design projects before they get authorization to fund the project from the public. The vast majority of the time this works, but occasionally it doesn’t because of the issues mentioned earlier.
Farmers Branch controls the west lane of Midway from Spring Valley all the way north to almost Beltway Drive. We did not know what their financial participation would be in the construction process, but we felt they should participate if one lane was in their city. We did not have a final design and cost for landscaping and the bond committee didn’t really talk about utility relocations at that time. Most of the focus was on the part that was north of Belt line, because the committee had been made aware that this was the section that had the most problems.
I haven’t seen the new design for Midway, but I have heard that it has a substantial allocation for landscaping and for utility relocation that was not in the original plans. The Dallas area is booming with all of the major relocations coming to the area like Toyota, State Farm, and Liberty Mutual Insurance. Construction cost have escalated rapidly over the last five years.
Todd Meier was the mayor in 2012. He heard the same presentations from the bond committee we all did, so trying to place blame for the estimate being off seems a bit disingenuous at this point. The committee and the professionals did their best with the information they had when they were setting the scope and budget for the project in late 2011. I can’t emphasize enough that the engineering estimates for projects over the years have been pretty accurate.
If you spent a million dollars designing the project before it was approved by the voters you still don’t know when you are going to build it and what construction prices will be at the time. It could potentially keep you from changing the scope of the project as has apparently been done on Midway recently, but there are no guarantees. It is what it is and you are now probably looking at 2018 at the earliest before you do anything on Midway. The choices are the same. Don’t do anything, re-engineer the project to fit the money or go back to the voters and ask them for additional authorization. Move forward!