Columnist Jeff German: A 17-story monument to bad government

Friday, Sept. 13, 2002 | 4:52 a.m.

IF YOU'RE DRIVING anywhere downtown, you can't help but notice the "project from hell," the troubled construction site of the 17-story Regional Justice Center and jail expansion.

It's the largest and most expensive building project ever undertaken by Clark County, and it's more than a year behind schedule and $33 million over budget. The overall cost to taxpayers now is approaching $290 million.

From the very beginning of construction nearly three years ago, this ambitious endeavor, which is supposed to centralize and relieve an overburdened justice system with new courtrooms and jail beds, has been an exercise in bad government.

Design flaws, construction gaffes and work stoppages all have delayed construction and produced cost overruns.

The county has been fighting with its general contractor, AF Construction, which has never spearheaded a project of this size, and AF Construction has been at odds with its subcontractors, some of whom have walked off the job.

All the while the county has failed to properly oversee the struggling project.

"There's plenty of blame to go around," says County Manager Thom Reilly, who inherited this nightmare when he came on board in August 2001. "There were bad decisions made on both sides."

County Aviation Director Randy Walker, assigned by Reilly in January to save the project, lays most of the blame on AF Construction.

"I've never dealt with a contractor who has less ability to organize a job than this one," says Walker, who has overseen several expansion projects at McCarran International Airport. "They just can't get their act together."

But political consultant Terry Murphy, who represents AF Construction, says the county deserves much of the blame for allowing the decision-making process during the construction to get bogged down in red tape.

"It's been kind of plagued from the get-go," Murphy says. "We've done as well as anybody could have done, given the circumstances."

Who's at fault for this fiasco likely will be determined in court, long after the Regional Justice Center is completed next year.

What's clear is this project, billed as a way to save taxpayers money, has been a bureaucratic mess from the start with little to no oversight. Millions have been wasted.

The way things have turned out, it probably would have been cheaper to rent ballroom space from the Golden Nugget for new courtrooms.

George Stevens, the county's chief financial officer, confirms that no county staffers ever were assigned to monitor the progress of the multimillion-dollar Regional Justice Center on a daily basis.

In 1997, as plans for the justice center were being drawn up, Stevens says, the county manager's office set aside $500,000 for five full-time positions -- a manager, an architect, an engineer, a construction inspector and a financial analyst -- to keep tabs on the project.

Another $5 million was earmarked to hire the private firm of Jacobs Facilities Inc. to serve as construction manager (the county's eyes and ears) at the site.

The project fell into the lap of Dale Askew, who succeeded Pat Shalmy as county manager in April 1997.

Askew's general services director, Earl Hawkes, eventually found a staffer to oversee the project. Ted Rexing was promoted to a management position in 1997 and assigned full time to the Regional Justice Center. Financial Analyst David Dobrzynski also was asked to work part time on the project, and the other three positions were going to be filled after construction started.

But Rexing resigned his job a couple of months before AF Construction was awarded the construction contract in November 1999, leaving the county in a quandary.

"We just didn't have anybody in-house qualified to take on a construction project of this size," Stevens says. "We would have had to go outside to hire someone, and that could have taken anywhere from three to six months."

So with the project about to begin, the decision was made not to replace Rexing or fill the other three positions that would have fallen under his supervision. Instead, Askew and Hawkes decided to rely solely on Jacobs Facilities to oversee construction.

Both Askew and Hawkes have since retired, and Askew says his memory on the subject is fuzzy.

But the handling of the project under Askew's watch has come under fire from Reilly.

"We should have had an on-site (county staffer) there from Day 1," Reilly says. "You can't have a bad contractor with no oversight."

The weak monitoring system has contributed to the construction slowdown and caused costs to run wild, forcing the county to throw money at Regional Justice Center to keep it alive.

In April, having been told by Walker and Stevens that he had a financial mess on his hands, Reilly reluctantly asked the County Commission to pour another $33 million in taxpayer funds into the project.

About $900,000 of that money was set aside to pay Bechtel Infrastructure Corp. to help Walker oversee the county's well-paid overseer, Jacobs Facilities, which by then had racked up $9.5 million in fees.

Walker estimates still another $15 million ultimately may be needed to fight AF Construction in court.

This is not what the voters envisioned in 1996 when they gave the county permission to issue $120 million in municipal bonds without raising taxes to help finance the justice center.

This is not the way good government is supposed to work.

This is an example of a bureaucracy gone bad, a government asleep at the switch while the taxpayers foot the bill.

In 1996 justice center advocates, including then-District Judge Nancy Becker, District Attorney Stewart Bell and Sheriff Jerry Keller, promised voters that this project wouldn't cost the public a dime.

They were only $32,999,999.90 short. And counting.