Five trees died almost immediately. Although Molix knew why, it's not unusual to lose a few trees right after you plant a group of them, so rather than fight the city over it, Molix simply replaced the trees at his own cost--$538 per red oak and $600 per pear.
But the trees kept dying. By October, a quarter of them were dead. And city officials realized that the project was becoming an expensive problem--and not just because of the trees.
The city is looking at $500,000 in cost overruns, Public Works' Parker told me, after explaining that the job had run into unexpected problems, such as contaminated soil and old building slabs. The contractors can't be paid until the council approves more money, he said.
Parker told me that, as of October, the council had yet to learn that the project was not only over budget, but in debt; it owed contractors like Molix, who had worked night and day without pay to get the project finished for the all-important World Cup games.
In other words, Public Works didn't intend to ask the council for the money ($352,000, after applying unspent funds from another city department that worked on the project)--it had to have it. "The money's there--available from someone in the city," Parker told me. (If this is true, this young bureaucrat knows more than the council members do.) "I really can't discuss much about the funding. I just beg for the money. And they find it. A lot of it comes from savings from other projects."
Parker informed me that he would be going to the council shortly for the additional funding. That was late October. This is mid-January. Molix is still waiting for $82,000 on the Farmers Market project (including $34,000 for soil costs that the city disputes). The city council will be asked for the $352,000 needed--for the first time--on February 8, according to Parker.
But the figure they're given will be $50,000 shy.
Because that's what it's going to cost to replace all the dead trees and the compacted soil, which the city brains have now determined is too hard and dense to allow baby trees to grow in. "Those trees died because, according to one of our landscape guys over here, the soil isn't draining properly," Parker told me, as though this were a revelation. "Our position is that the specs HOK provided did not provide an adequate method of drainage."
And what does HOK have to say about this? "I really wouldn't be in a position to comment on that," says HOK vice-president Dave Retzsch. "I would defer any comment to Public Works."
And how is Public Works going to rectify this problem?
"The position of the city is that it's a problem," said Parker, who acknowledges Molix warned the city about the tree-drainage problem. "We're not sure who is liable for it. The matter is probably going to be turned over to the city attorneys."
Before that happened, though, Parker asked Molix for a bid on redoing the work. Not surprisingly, it calls for taking out the compacted soil around each tree and replacing it with highly porous soil. It calls for 38 new red oak trees and, to replace the pear trees, seven bald cypress, which thrive in swamp-like environments.
Molix submitted a bid for $50,000. On October 13, he and Ed Bell got a letter back, asking for a per-tree price, and telling them to proceed with the work. Molix was, to put it mildly, amused.
"Here they still owed me all this money, and yet they were out of money, and they were still talking about trying to pin this mistake on somebody--and for all I know they could try to pin it on me in some kind of way--so I wasn't about to do anything. We immediately sent them back a letter asking them to assure us we'll get paid as soon as the job is done, and there's no liability for it. Parker said he'd review my letter with the city attorney. But I never heard anything."
Like everything else on this project--now that the World Cup's over--things are moving slow. It was only last week, in fact, that Parker contacted the city attorney's office--for the first time ever.
"Public Works called me two or three days ago," Assistant City Attorney Larry Scalff told me last Friday. "It seems there are dying trees out there. And they want legal advice."
Too bad no one at the city took Molix's advice when they first got it.
