Bob CollinsAre construction companies “fibbing” when they say a road project is “completed” in time to get a get-it-done-fast bonus?
Lazy Lightning has one example of questionable “completeness:” Burnsville Parkway. The contractor on the project was to get $10,000 a day for every day the roadway was open before the construction deadline, according to This Week in Burnsville. It said the road has opened.
But Bill Roehl at Lazy Lightning found the truth to be somewhat different:
Now, as you can see from the mobile phone photo taken on September 5th (30 days later) displayed at the top of this post, all lanes of Burnsville Parkway are certainly not open and thus in no way did the construction company make the minimum requirements as mentioned in the Thisweek article. If Burnsville Parkway still has to have two lanes closed (both of the eastbound lanes are closed at Nicollet as you can see above) to do any sort of work on that stretch of road then the City should not have ever have agreed that the job was done enough to grant a $100,000 bonus. If you’re going to make a bonus for a quick end to construction then it better be completed in such a way that the road will not need to be closed during any time to finish the job. I mean, it’s great and all that Thisweek chose to stuff the article with a picture of a closed BP station but perhaps they should have gone out and taken a photo of the actual roadway in question before they decided to publish such a ridiculous article
Projects like this dot the metro area. Technically the roads are open for local businesses, but very few people are interested in navigating the nonsense to get to them.
