Molix, his head shaking in dismay, runs one finger down a long crack in the tree's gray bark--the first clue, he says, that this young red oak isn't alive any more. He points, too, to the mushroom-shaped fungus running up one side of the tree trunk. Then he gets down on one knee, in his nice gray flannel slacks, and takes special note of the green mold creeping along the soil at the tree's base.
"It's completely rotted," Molix says, pulling off bark as though he were peeling a tangerine. "It's a shame. All of these were beautiful trees. When we dropped them here we were so happy because they were such good-looking trees."
This is not a story about some dreaded tree disease that is striking the city. Nor is it a story about the ravages of unpredictable Texas weather, or the greed of some tree-insensitive developers.
This is a story about the esteemed handiwork of the people at Dallas City Hall--the same august group that manages to find a half-million dollars to spend studying a $200-million arena after recommending the shutdown of four inner-city swimming pools because the city can't scrape together $65,000.
This summer, when City Manager John Ware recommends closing more swimming pools, remind him about the trees.
Darold Molix's trees.
When the tourists came to Dallas for World Cup, they saw a city that was all gussied up.
The homeless had been airbrushed from downtown, the Cotton Bowl had a $12-million facelift for its last national hurrah, and the boulevards from downtown to Fair Park were widened, waxed, lit, and landscaped.
A big part of the pizzazz was the Farmers Market, the recipient of $15.4 million. The money was earmarked largely for cosmetic changes. The bulk of the money, $10.6 million, would be spent beautifying the streets. Another $2.3 million was for improvements to some of the fruit and vegetable buildings; the city built a new shed, a fancy trellis to cover an old one, and a kiosk to house food vendors.
The city is now spending another $2.5 million on a 10,000-square-foot administration building that will house city employees who oversee the market. (What do they do--make sure the tomatoes don't roll out of their bins?)
Anyway, when World Cup arrived, the Farmers Market looked spiffy--never mind that for $15 million there was not one new reason to come down to the market. No new restaurants, or plazas to enjoy at lunchtime, or fountains--no fresh drawing card at all. Just prettier houses for the fruits, flora, and vegetables.
Not to mention rows and rows of nice-looking new trees.
Which brings us to Molix.
As the owner of a small landscape and irrigation company, Molix was hired as one of the subcontractors on the Farmers Market project. His piece of the job totaled $1.2 million.
Molix did what he was told. He installed a sprinkler system and did irrigation and electrical work on Canton, Young, Marilla and Central Expressway. He ordered thousands of multicolored concrete pavers that, when laid side by side in a decorative pattern, created distinctive 18-foot-wide sidewalks along Marilla Street between Harwood and Central.
And he planted trees.
Sounds straightforward enough. But from the beginning, there were problems.
"This job was so bad," says Molix, who is no rookie when it comes to government work; 99 percent of the business his three-year-old company does is for the city of Dallas, its suburbs, and Dallas Area Rapid Transit. "You couldn't tell anyone about a problem and get anything done about it because there were too many go-betweens. The project kept bogging down for no good reason, running way behind schedule, and then, way before it was completed, it ran over budget and out of money. Which is why we all stopped getting paid last May."
But they all kept working--had to, they were told--because World Cup was coming.
Molix and his men worked every night and every weekend to get the work done, hustling like crazy to meet the June soccer-fest deadline.
The directive had come from the top, Molix and the others were told--from First Assistant City Manager Cliff Keheley, who wanted the city in perfect shape for World Cup. "Mr. Keheley had been pressing for completion," Public Works employee Steve Parker, the project manager on the Farmers Market improvements, told me last fall, "and we did want to have as much done as possible for World Cup."
Unfortunately for the taxpayers, the city staff was more concerned about meeting deadlines than getting the work right.
When Molix first started work in August 1993, he took one look at the design plans executed by Dallas-based HOK Architects and balked. Some of the landscaping and tree-planting was fine. But the work along Marilla Street was not. This is a strange way to plant trees, he told the general contractor who had hired him, Ed Bell Construction.
The Marilla Street plans called for Molix to sink 38 baby red oak trees in soil that was hard as a rock--95 percent compacted. That, Molix says, "is hard enough to bounce a shovel off of." Then, when the trees were in the ground, Molix was supposed to cover up the soil with 18-foot-wide decorative sidewalks, leaving only a small hole for the trunk of each tree. "The landscape architect on the job said we needed highly compacted soil because there'd be heavy traffic on the sidewalks during certain seasons--they envisioned small vendors driving up on the sidewalks and parking and unloading small booths," Molix says. "I said, 'That's okay. That's fine. But you can't grow trees in that.'"
At the end of Marilla--at the large circular intersection where the street meets Harwood--Molix was told to plant seven baby pear trees. The plan for that task was even more ridiculous than the design for the red oaks.
Molix walks over to the dead and dying pear trees that now encircle the intersection. He points to the hapless trees, all of which are stuck in the same murderous combination of compacted soil and concrete.
"On this, we had a different design flaw," Molix explained. "There's a drain under here, under the tree, and there's a pipe that comes up from the drain and sticks out of the soil. When there's too much water, you stick a pump down the pipe and pump the water out."
Molix smiled before he continued. "The problem is that the pipe is way over here under the sidewalk," Molix said, putting one tasseled loafer a full two feet away from the small opening in the sidewalk where the tree trunk juts out of the ground.
"I told Ed Bell, 'Listen, if I put the pipe over here, you won't be able to reach it to put a pump into it," Molix says. "It will be covered up with concrete."
Even more ridiculous is the idea--not lost on Molix, who laughs at the mere mention--that the city would even consider constructing anything that requires a member of its ever-dwindling street and park maintenance staff to babysit the landscaping. Go pump water out of the base of seven pear trees every time it rains? This is the city, after all, that has been too broke to mow parks or medians more than every 21 days, or water the parks and flower beds--or replace the trees and shrubs that die, of course, from lack of water.
This is not brain surgery here. This is common sense.
"Red oaks hate water," Molix says. "When it rains, all the water goes right into these little holes and fills up. There's no place for the water to go. And look at these pear trees--they're at the bottom of an incline, and the rainwater rushes into these holes like a flood. The trees simply drown. They rot."
Molix told this to Ed Bell Construction, which told it to Henry C. Beck Co., the construction manager on the project. It was mentioned, among other times, at a big meeting between Beck, Bell, and city public works officials. All of them, he says, promptly ignored the advice.
The Observer tried unsuccessfully to talk to Henry C. Beck officials. Beck's vice-president of operations, Sid Henson, declined to be interviewed. He referred all questions about the project to Steve Parker at the city. (Win Bell, president of Bell Construction, also refused comment.)
Molix is not surprised. "Beck told Ed Bell to tell me to just follow the blueprints," Molix says. "The way they look at it is if they suggest that it be done a different way, and then it doesn't work, it becomes their problem. But if they go with the flow, and it doesn't work, then it's someone else's problem."
Yes--unfortunately, that someone else is Dallas taxpayers.
Molix's Marilla Street trees, which he bought from a tree farm in Louisiana and shipped to Dallas, cost the taxpayers $24,600 to purchase and plant. The roughly 2,000 yards of soil Molix used on Marilla to plant the trees there cost $45,000.
Today, of course--17 months after Molix first expressed his concerns--more than half the trees covered by the decorative sidewalk pavers are stone dead. And the rest are destined to become that way.
Molix looks back on the whole saga, and he doesn't see how he could have prevented the problem. After Beck insisted that he just follow the specs, Molix took his concerns straight to the city--a big no-no in the crazy world of tax-paid construction.
"There are people like David White with the city who know me well enough to know that if there's something I have a concern about, it's legitimate," says Molix, referring to one of the city's landscape architects in the public works department. "I mean, if I bring something like this up, it's not because I'm trying to do something bad to the project, or the city. I'm trying to avoid problems."
When Beck officials found out that Molix was still pursuing his dream of planting trees that would have half a chance to live, they were not happy. "They got mad at me," says Molix. "In fact, they sent Ed Bell a letter telling them not to let their subcontractors go directly to the city any more--to only go through them. It was ridiculous. This is a project that took a whole lot longer to build because of things like that. It could have been finished a long, long time ago. And it could have been finished right."
Instead, the rains came--as they always do--and the trees began dying. Just as Molix had said they would.
"We had so much rain last spring when we planted the trees, and as soon as it would stop raining, I would send my guys down here to start bailing out the trees," says Molix. "They'd get on their hands and knees and scoop water out of the holes with a little cup--you couldn't fit anything bigger in those holes. It would take two of my guys a half a day to get all the water out. And then the next day it would rain."
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.