Justice center finish date set for July 14

Friday, June 11, 2004 | 10:54 a.m.

The contractor for the 17-story Regional Justice Center -- which is 2 1/2 years overdue and $15 million over budget -- recently told Clark County that the building will be finished by July 14, the county's overseer for the project, Randy Walker, said Thursday.

Walker said he has "absolutely no confidence in that date."

As they have for more than two years, county officials and the contractor, AF Construction, are continuing to argue over the finishing details and how best to resolve defects of the building at South Casino Center and Clark Avenue. Both also continue to blame each other for the delays, the rising cost and the construction problems.

Most of the work left to do is remedial or cosmetic, said Walker, director of the Clark County Aviation Department and the county's designated supervisor of the work.

Many of the major defects -- such as a leaky roof on the top floor -- have been repaired, he allowed.

Workers, however, are redoing the roof on the fifth floor outdoor patio because the wrong materials were used and not installed correctly, Walker said. And all of the windows on the east side of the 17-story structure have to be repaired because leak-protective metal flashing was not properly installed, he said.

Some floors of the building obviously slope downward, such as those in what is intended to be District Court Administrator Chuck Short's office. The room has been carpeted, the baseboards added and the room painted, but there's no desk made that can adjust to the unlevel flooring without being askew, Walker said. The floors will have to be fixed before the building can be occupied.

Other issues are not structural but cosmetic, such as the wooden doors to many of the courtrooms. The handles are rough to the touch and the doors look shabby next to the dark mahogany inside the courtroom.

"This is supposed to be a really high quality courtroom and this is just unacceptable," Walker said of the doors.

He said he is fighting with the contractor on how the doors should be fixed.

"They've admitted they need to fix it but we're not sure how," said Walker, who wants the doors replaced. "What they typically do is come up with the cheapest solution possible but not necessarily the right solution."

Take, for example, the contractors' solution to scratches on the Italian marble tile throughout the building. Instead of buffing out the scratches or replacing the tile, AF Construction is filling the scratches with colored apoxy.

"The apoxy (paint) is not as durable as the actual tile," so it will make the tile much more difficult to maintain, Walker said.

Using the apoxy "is kind of stupid," Walker said.

But despite the county's wishes, workers on Thursday were still trying to repair the scratches by painstakingly matching the colorations in the dark salmon tile with tiny brushes and various shades of paint.

In the end, the scratches still show up -- they are now just the same color as the tile.

"We told them right up front that this wasn't acceptable and they did it anyway," Walker said.

Worker carelessness and vandalism also continue to mar the building. A worker reinstalling the fifth floor patio roof tracked tar all over the carpet along a back hallway, and workers scratched a tic-tac-toe game board onto one of the building's fire doors.

It's the contractor's responsibility to fix and pay for all of the damage to the building as well as the construction defects, Walker said. That currently amounts to $10 million.

The county stopped paying AF Construction in March 2003 because of defects in the construction and has been levying $12,000-a-day fines against the company for every day the building is not completed, Walker said.

AF Construction claims county design flaws caused much of the delays and some of the defects, and has sued the county, charging the county with mismanagement, breach of contract and defamation in connection with the justice center and related Clark County Detention Center expansion.

"We built what was in the design, and what was designed in our mind was flawed and we are in arbitration," Terry Murphy, president of Strategic Solutions, the contractor's public relations firm, said.

Murphy also said the building had to be built out of sequence so that AF Construction could continue work as they waited for the county to approve design corrections.

That's the main reason the tile got scratched, Murphy said.

"If we had waited to install the tile until all of our construction questions were answered, it still wouldn't be installed," he said.

An arbitrator will have to work out who is to blame for what after the building is finished, both Murphy and Walker said.

Construction began in January 2000 and was originally scheduled to be completed by January 2002. The county-approved construction costs on the building alone have gone up about $7 million, from $123.5 million to about $130 million.

But the project also is $8 million over budget in overhead and other project costs because of the delay, raising the total cost from $169.9 million to $185 million, county officials said.

AF Construction was the lowest qualified bidder for the building, but several county officials have questioned whether it was the right company for the job. The justice center was the first building of that magnitude for the contractor, and Clark County Manager Thom Reilly said it was "not up to par."

The center is also the first building of that size for the county, Reilly said, and he has admitted that there was probably not sufficient oversight before he came on the job and appointed Walker to step in.

"Good oversight can make up for a not-so-good contractor, and a good contractor can make up for poor oversight," Reilly said. "You're doomed if you have a bad contractor and little oversight."

The experience led the county to ask the 2003 Nevada Legislature to add several more criteria to the state's lowest bid requirement that allows county and other state officials to ensure a company is qualified to do the construction.

The finished center is intended to house the Las Vegas Municipal Court, Las Vegas Justice Court, Clark County District Court and offices of the Nevada Supreme Court, along with the Marriage Bureau and traffic court for both Las Vegas and Clark County. Offices for both the district and city attorneys will also be located in the 700,000 square-foot building.

But after the county deems the construction acceptable, it will take an additional six months for furniture and audio-visual equipment to be installed and for the county and city employees to move in, Walker said.