Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Mediation date set for contractor's $6 million+ claim against Joplin R-8

The recently issued state audit of the Joplin R-8 School District noted the district spent $3 million extra in its rush to get Joplin High School opened for the 2014-2015 school year.

That amount is likely to go up a few million.

A mediation hearing is scheduled for 10- a.m. June 1 at the law offices of Polsinelli PC in Kansas City, where Jerry Palmer of Palmer Mediation LLC, Topeka, Kansas, will hear from the district and from the Lenexa electrical contractor P1, which claims the district owes it more than six million dollars to cover overtime, larger crews, mote supervisors and other costs associated with the mad dash to get the building open on time.

The Polsinelli law firm is representing Joplin R-8

The school district filed the initial lawsuit against P1 in March in U. S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri after receiving a $7 million bill from the company. District officials were aware that P1 was preparing its own legal action.

The school district claims it does not owe P1 anything because "despite demand, P1 Group has failed to remedy its defective work and says that all of the costs claimed by P1 "were not included into an approved change order."

The two-count action claims breach of contract and asks for a declaratory judgment..

The bill, dated March 18, and addressed to Huff, Archie Smith of Universal Construction Company, the project manager, and architect Chad Greer of Corner, Greer and Associates, put the blame for the extra costs squarely on the acceleration of the project.

In the bill, the P1 Group asked for $7,078,464, including $2,379,986 for "acceleration inefficiencies," $1,439,215 for "overtime inefficiencies," and $711,952 for "added supervision,"

The extra supervision was required when Universal, at Huff's request, gave the go-ahead to push the project to try to meet Huff's self-imposed deadline of having the school ready by opening day. P1 was forced to increase its staffing from 30 to 100, according to the bill.

"P1 was forced to work additional man hours due to the accelerated, disrupted, bi-furcated, out-of-sequence and delayed work method experienced throughout the project.

"In addition, P1 was not able to achieve its planned rate of efficiency due, in part, to the fact that when the work was accelerated and P1 was required to staff the project with up to 100 men working 8,200 man hours per week rather than the planned average crew size consisting of 30 men working 1,200 man hours per week and with a projected maximum crew size of 42 men working 1,680 man hours, the quality of the laborers diminished."

P1 filed a counterclaim in April. 

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Huff costing tax payers more money and further damaging our districts reputation. When will enough be enough?

Anonymous said...

You think this is bad---David Wallace is now a "business mentor" for International Accelerator an Austin TX org. WTF?!!!!!!!!He and Bajjali are long over--time for a new scam.

Anonymous said...

10:16 AM: A whole lot of accelerators, although certainly not all, are scams, so Wallace should fit right in. And we are allowed to speculate that his proven ability to scam was why they decided to hire him.

Anonymous said...

Clearly P1 is incapable of understanding that it really is all for the kids.

kitty chiwawa said...

https://www.change.org/p/board-of-education-joplin-public-schools-joplin-mo-terminate-the-employment-of-district-superintendent-c-j-huff

Anonymous said...

Huff has gotten by too long. He should have been fired after the first two years he was here but got a pass due to the tornado for which he is still using. People are sick and tired of his crying and using the tornado. Any other individuals in any other jobs would have been fired. Why is it a board representing the patrons and children has allegiance
To him over everything else. Unprofessional
Have a backbone and fire him or reassign him to a closet in some building.