“This has really been a saga.” Andy Hirose, administrator of the Solid Waste Division of Maui County’s Public Works Department, sighs as he sums up the county’s efforts to develop Phase IV of the Central Maui landfill.
From his window office on the fourth floor of the Maui County government building in Wailuku, the landfill is a brown speck in the middle of cane fields about two miles south of the Kahului airport, near Pu`unene.
What the county has built is a far cry from the project that went out to bid in mid-1997. What was to have been a landfill of 26 acres with a volume of 2.2 million cubic yards and a useful life of six to seven years has been sized down to 10 acres, whose volume of 600,000 cubic yards is expected, at current rates of tipping, to have a useful life of two and a half years.
Despite the downsizing, project costs have gone up — thanks in no small part to a process, called value engineering, that was supposed to have saved the county money. Initial construction and engineering costs came to roughly $5.7 million over and above $600,000 that the county paid A&B for the land. With a complete redesign and added construction costs, the county will now have to pay $7.2 million for the project.
To top it all off, the county has yet to receive the needed Department of Health permit to build the facility. For more than a year, the DOH and Maui County have engaged in a tense stand-off, with the county barely escaping delivery of a threatened stop-work order from the DOH, whose engineers have expressed serious reservations about features of the redesigned landfill that were not part of the original plans submitted to the department as part of the permitting process.
More than a year after construction of the landfill started, the Department of Health is still waiting for the county to submit plans and engineering specifications. Hirose, meanwhile, waits for the County Council to give his division the $1.5 million it will take to bring this project to completion.
A Rocky Start
Bids for the contract to construct Maui Central Landfill Phase IV were opened on August 13, 1997. Rojac Construction, Inc., was the winning bidder among the seven companies that submitted bid packages, based on specifications drawn up by Masa Fujioka & Associates, an engineering firm on O`ahu, in partnership with a SHN Consulting Engineers and Geologists, based in Eureka, California.
Soon after the bid was awarded, a dispute arose between Ameron and the county over soil and rock that Ameron had excavated at the project site. Ameron had used the site as a quarry until the county purchased it from A&B. Original contract specifications had dealt with the overburden as though it were the county’s property. The winning bidder “shall make their own arrangements for teh disposal of the excavated material and bear all costs or retain any profit incidental to such disposal,” bid documents stated.
As a condition of the property’s sale, which was being worked out at the same time as the bidding process was underway, Ameron was to retain ownership of the material. A revision to the bidding documents now called for any excess soil or overburden at the job site to be “stockpiled on Ameron’s property,” with the contractor instructed to negotiate “rock/basalt disposal with Ameron.”
But, according to Rojac, Ameron would not negotiate. “We made contact with Ameron on the day of the bid to clarify haul routes and request pricing for their aggregate and concrete,” Gary Watanabe, vice president of Rojac, informed the county by letter dated September 11, 1997. “They refused to provide us any information… Ameron refused to negotiate with us.”
Watanabe continued: “We are of the opinion that, by not presenting a fixed agreement in the bid documents, the County of Maui has allowed the potential for a private enterprise outside of the county government to control the bid process. Ameron stated during our meeting on September 4, 1997, that they negotiated separately with all the other contractors except Rojac Construction, Inc. This individual negotiation could provide a means for unequal pricing and could potentially allow favoritism or handicapping of individual contractors bidding the project. This could be a violation of state procurement law.”
As a result of Watanabe’s concerns, the county Finance Department decided to cancel the solicitation for bids. Even though Rojac had won the job at the August bid opening, it was the county’s view that the contract — signed by Watanabe on September 9 — was not valid since it had not yet been signed by a county representative. On September 22, county Finance Director Travis O. Thompson notified Rojac and other bidders of the cancellation. Justifying his action, he wrote: “I noted that significant elements of the solicitation were ambiguous or otherwise inadequate. In particular, I noted that the ownership of overburden or excess excavated soil on the landfill site was unclear in the project specifications.” Contrary to bid specifications, he wrote, the county had determined that responsibility for negotiations with Ameron rested with the county. Bidders were invited to respond to a new solicitation that the county was asking Masa Fujioka and its partner, SHN, a mainland engineering firm, to prepare.
Rojac protested, and when the county remained firm in its decision, Rojac appealed the decision to the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs’ Office of Administrative Hearings. No hearing was held; before one was scheduled, the hearings officer notified the county informally that its position was weak, a staffer with the Finance Department told Environment Hawai`i. The county gave up on the idea of rebidding the job under new specifications and started working with Rojac, Ameron, and A&B to resolve the overburden problem.
In the end, Ameron moved about 360,000 cubic yards of material to its adjoining quarry site. Rojac deleted from its contract price the $1 million cost item it had included to excavate the soil. Offsetting that deduction was an increase of $448,350, most of which was to cover costs of purchasing soil for the subgrade (the layer below the landfill liner) and operations layer (the cushion between the liner and the first layer of refuse). Included in Rojac’s new expenses was $6,000 in attorneys’ fees.
Value Engineering
Parametrix, Inc., an engineering firm based in Northwest Washington state, has worked with Maui County on several earlier solid waste projects. The Solid Waste Division could not readily locate its files on the request for proposals for Phase IV design to confirm whether Parametrix had submitted a proposal for that project. But Dwight Miller, an engineer with Parametrix, told Environment Hawai`i that the firm “probably did bid on the preliminary engineering, operations plan” for Phase IV, the job that eventually went to Masa Fujioka & Associates and SHN, of Eureka, California. A Department of Health official also recalled that Parametrix had submitted a proposal for the design work.
In the spring of 1997, when the Department of Health was reviewing the construction plans for Maui Central Phase IV, Parametrix was developing plans for a Moloka`i solid waste facility. Almost casually, it would seem, the county asked Parametrix to conduct its own review of the MFA/SHN design.
Miller and Gary Arndt, another Parametrix engineer, carried out the review in May and June of 1997. The review included a meeting in May with Gary Siu, an engineer with the Department of Health’s Office of Solid Waste Management, to discuss the county’s permit application.
On June 20, 1997, Miller faxed his three-page report to David Goode, deputy director of the Department of Public Works and, at the time, interim chief of its Solid Waste Division. He identified several features of the landfill design as problematic, including an undersized leachate collection system, undersized leachate lagoon, and bottom slopes too steep to be stable. In addition, Miller suggested that excavation issues be addressed and “recalculated with respect to what will be removed by the contractor and what is being remove[d] now by Ameron’s operations.” (For its work, Parametrix billed the county $3,490 — a bill that, Environment Hawai`i discovered, the county inadvertently paid twice.)
Parametrix’s participation and comments at the meeting with DOH staff raised questions. In July 1997, the DOH made its first formal response to Maui County’s permit application for the project. Noting Miller’s participation in the May 1997 meeting, John Harder, then-director of the Office of Solid Waste Management, mentioned Miller “indicated that he has been requested to re-engineer the existing proposal” of Masa Fujioka, Harder wrote. Harder asked for the county to “clarify your intentions” since any “modifications to the application document would affect the permit review process.”
Harder’s letter went unanswered. It was not until the spring of 1998 that the county finally explained Parametrix’s role in the project to the DOH.
In the summer of 1997, though, when the project had yet to go to bid and prospective contractors were receiving a near-constant flow of addenda to contract specifications, the county ignored the warnings of Parametrix that the design of its Phase IV landfill was seriously flawed.
A Second Bite
An element in the contract going out to bid called for review of the project plans by an independent engineering consultant. This process, known as value engineering, is intended to identify areas where costs can be cut by changing some of the contract specifications so long as the integrity of the project is not compromised. To give incentive to the contractor, the savings are typically split 50-50 between the contractor and the county.
Shortly after Rojac won the bid, Parametrix approached the company with an interest in the value engineering work. According to Arndt, he had worked with Watanabe when Watanabe was with Fletcher Pacific. Rojac had apparently decided to sign on with Parametrix by September 4, when Watanabe met with county officials and informed them that any cost impacts associated with the disputed ownership of the overburden remaining at the landfill site could be mitigated by savings effected through the value engineering process.
In his letter to the county of September 11, mentioned earlier, Watanabe recounts this meeting: “As discussed with Mr. Andrew Hirose … we, together with Parametrix, Inc., are prepared to present a value engineering proposal for this project that should be of significant proportions that will probably mitigate cost impacts to the county of Maui caused by the private agreements with Ameron not covered by the bid documents.”
A Pared-Down Liner
On December 29, 1997, the contract between Rojac and the county was finally executed by both parties. Barely two weeks later, the value engineering report of Parametrix was submitted to the county.
The report identified one item where, it claimed, the contract specifications could be amended without affecting the integrity of the project. “This item,” the report states, “reduces construction costs and operational costs, and increases the capacity of the landfill. The liner system for Phase IV is over designed and would benefit from redesign of several of the layers that comprise the liner system.”
According to an independent engineer familiar with landfill construction, liners are the one part of a landfill that should be overdesigned. If anything goes wrong with them, the Department of Health can require operators to repair them — a messy, costly, time-consuming business.
Parametrix estimated the savings from redesign of the liner and drainage system to be $1 million. However, that amount was based on the full 26 acres of the original footprint being lined. With the redesigned landfill covering just 10 acres, Maui County eventually credited the value engineering with savings totaling just $380,000, half of which went to Rojac.
Miscalculations?
At the same time it undertook the value engineering study, Parametrix offered the county once more its critical assessment of the fundamental design of the landfill. “This review has raised concerns about the functionality of some key design features,” Parametrix states in a report to the county proposing several design modifications, all of which had been identified in the June 1997 memo to the county.
Parametrix offered several approaches to making the slopes more stable. All would either raise the cost of the project or reduce its capacity (by making slopes less steep).
The leachate collection system designed by Masa Fujioka & Associates was based on a miscalculation, Parametrix told the county. The leachate conveyance and storage system should be designed to handle the runoff and leachate that would be generated by the worst 24-hour rainfall expected to occur in a 25-year period. For the Pu`unene area of Maui, this comes to 7.5 inches over 24 hours. According to Parametrix, the engineer doing the calculations for Masa Fujioka made a simple error in long division and came up with a rainfall of 0.0023 inches per hour instead of .3125.
“The math error resulted in underestimating leachate production by over 750,000 gallons per day,” Parametrix wrote. “The design is off by a factor of 140. To put the calculation error in perspective, the design engineer developed a system to collect a trickle of water when a river of water will be coming out of the landfill. A concept error of this magnitude must be corrected prior to construction.”
Whereas Masa Fujioka plans called for one 25-gallon-per-minute pump to drain leachate, Parametrix called for two 200-gpm pumps. Where Masa Fujioka anticipated maximum leachate flow at 10,867 gallons a day, the Parametrix model predicts maximum flows of 1.5 million gallons a day.
Instead of a 10,000-gallon tank to collect runoff and leachate, Parametrix was now proposing a basin large enough to hold 3 million gallons — sufficient, it claimed, to hold all the leachate and runoff generated at full build-out of the landfill (not just Phase IV, but Phases V and VI as well, covering an area of some 60 acres).
Changing Plans
After the county received the Parametrix report so critical of the plans prepared by Masa Fujioka & Associates, on March 5, 1998, it invited landfill engineer Gregory N. Richardson, of Raleigh, North Carolina, to review the design. His report was delivered to the county on April 1. Generally the plans met federal requirements, he concluded, but they did “not meet current standards of practice [or] incorporate typical components used to improve the operational efficiency of the landfill.”
Still, Richardson continued, “I do not believe it would take more than two weeks for MFA to implement the minor changes necessary to improve the operational characteristics of this landfill.”
Yet by then, Masa Fujioka was out of the picture — as it had been since the day before Richardson was asked to review the plans. On March 4, 1998, the county had given Parametrix the green light to proceed with redesign of the landfill.
Although the contract for that redesign was not executed until October 1998, the scope of work was set forth in a memo of March 2 from Miller to Hirose. “Landfill Phase 4 has been permitted by the Department of Health, based upon their review of previously prepared engineering reports, plans and specifications,” Miller wrote in the memo. (Actually, it has yet to be permitted; when asked about Miller’s claim, Hirose acknowledged it was “erroneous.”)
Miller continues: “Because of significant design modifications and lack of a new operations plan, the county needs to update its engineering documentation and prepare a new operations plan.” The contract issued in October calls for payment of $82,294.08 to Parametrix, an amount that was augmented by $2,700.43 in December. According to Hirose, that amount is roughly half of what the county will pay Parametrix for the job, but, given budget constraints, it was all the Solid Waste Division could encumber at the time. In his pending budget request before the County Council, Hirose said, is an additional $70,000 or $80,000 for Parametrix to complete the work.
Procurement laws customarily require the county to issue a request for proposals for consultant work where billings are expected to be above a nominal value. In this case, however, Environment Hawai`i could not track down any RFP for the redesign nor could it find any justification of the award of a sole-source contract to Parametrix.
Stalling Out
On March 5, 1998, Hirose told Rojac that the project was on hold.
This was not the first work stoppage for Rojac. The first in what was quickly turning out to be an on-again, off-again project occurred a month earlier, on February 4, when — according to a chronology prepared by Watanabe — the job was shutdown “due to lack of plans.” Work was restarted on February 9.
On March 9, Watanabe, Hirose, and Public Works Department head David Goode agreed to have Rojac continue with earthwork for the project. Several new tasks were added to Rojac’s contract (seeding some areas, repairing the surface of an Ameron road used by construction vehicles), but by May 22, Rojac was again out of work, “due to lack of plans and approvals.”
Much the same thing occurred in June; by the 26th, Rojac was shut down.
By July 1998, work was under way once more. A subcontractor, Northwest Linings, was brought in to line the landfill, which by now had been scaled back to 10 acres. The firm of Dames & Moore was brought in as quality control engineer, overseeing installation of the liner and seaming. By the end of the July, work stoppages and shutdowns had cost the county more than half a million dollars, according to a change order submitted by Rojac on July 24.
Flexible Specs
Several design features remained up in the air by the summer of 1998. One of the most important related to the material to be used for the operations layer.
Early on in the process, Parametrix had been extremely critical of the specification that “on-site clay” for the operations layer. “We understand that the County would like to use on-site soils as this greatly reduces the capital cost of importing soil,” Arndt wrote in a letter to Hirose of May 11, 1998. “The on-site soils are a silty clay,” he continued, noting that fine soil particles would settle out of the clay and clog the underlying drainage layer.
The Department of Health agreed with Parametrix that a sand-gravel mix known as county select borrow would be preferable for use as the operations layer. By the middle of 1998, however, Hirose was beginning to worry about cost overruns brought about by new designs for leachate collection systems, pumps, and other expenses associated with the redesigned project — all of which, Hirose noted, were eating up any savings associated with value engineering. To save costs, the county proposed to use the on-site soil instead of select borrow as the operations layer.
Notwithstanding his earlier objections, Arndt gave his OK to that proposal. The use of on-site soil conflicted with contract specifications, however, and Rojac sought some clarification in questions that were posed to Arndt in a fax dated October 20. “We cannot use the on-site material and follow the specification at the same time,” Watanabe wrote. “If you want to use the on-site material, you must furnish us with a new specification.” Arndt complied.
That Sinking Feeling
Watanabe asked further: “How thick a layer of on-site material do you want as your operations layer? As discussed in our meeting yesterday an 18″ thick layer of uncompacted on-site soil will not have enough bearing capacity to protect the liner layers. You are fully aware that our feet sank into the material up to 6″ just by walking on it. Just imagine what a track dozer will do. We already have experience installing this material … on the cushion layer, and we know for a fact that you will be jeopardizing the integrity of the liners.” Arndt instructed Rojac to go with an 18-inch layer.
Three days later, Rojac issued a change order to the county, deleting the expense of purchasing 10,000 cubic yards of select borrow, at $24 a cubic yard, and adding the costs associated with using the onsite clay for the operations layer. Among other things, the contractor now had to place a layer of large stones, called filter rock, over the drainage collection pipes to prevent them being silted up with the clay, and, to prevent the gravel from itself being silted up, plans now called for placing a plastic membrane — at a cost of 57 cents per square foot — over the gravel. Total claimed costs associated with using clay as the operations layer came to $231,000, or just $9,000 less than using select borrow would have cost.
The county protested Rojac’s claimed costs. In view of the protests, the meager cost savings associated with the on-site clay and the Department of Health’s firmly stated objections to its use, the county decided in the end to go with select borrow.
Hurry Up And Wait
Environment Hawai`i asked Hirose why the county did not follow Parametrix’s initial recommendations of May and June 1997 and redesign the landfill before letting it out for bid. Hirose said that the county was in something of a rush at the time to get work started. Years earlier, county engineers were predicting that the useful life of Phases I and II of the landfill was rapidly coming to an end. (Phase III of the landfill is a co-composting operation, which opened about five years ago.)
Based on a haul rate of about 600 tons a day, the county calculated that it would need to open Phase IV by the end of 1998. In mid-1997, the county was still following that schedule, he said.
Since then, several changes have occurred in the county’s waste stream. The co-composting facility is diverting about 100 tons a day, with recycling also having an impact. The daily haul to the landfill was as low as 400 tons a day, he said — a figure that would extend the useful life of the existing site by years.
Added to that, the county was achieving much greater rates of compacting refuse, Hirose said. In past years, compaction rates were around 800 pounds per cubic yard. Nowadays, he said, the county is compacting refuse to the point that a cubic yard can contain between 1,200 and 1,400 pounds of refuse. With such compaction, years of life can be added to Phases I and II.
Offsetting those gains, however, has been the closure of the construction and demolition landfill at Ma`alaea. This, Hirose said, is adding up to 200 tons per day of refuse to the waste stream at Central Maui Phases I and II. If Ma`alaea is not reopened, the county could be faced with a need to begin operations at Phase IV much earlier than the 2002 opening it now anticipates.
An Overbuilt System?
One of the abiding concerns of engineers at the Department of Health is the sizing of the leachate collection pond of the new landfill. “The Department of Health is supposed to ensure that good engineering practices are followed,” one engineer said. “As you build up a landfill, less leachage is collected and more moisture is held by the waste itself, which acts like a giant sponge.”
Elsewhere in Hawai`i, newly constructed landfills, compliant with existing state and federal regulations, have had no problem with minimal accommodation for leachate. The West Hawai`i landfill at Pu`uanahulu, for example, has no leachate pond, although its size at full build-out will be far larger than that of Central Maui Phases IV through VI.
But Hirose stands by the decision to build the leachate system “according to what is theoretically possible.” If the county has a 25-year storm before there is enough solid waste in the landfill to hold the rainfall, “it was prudent for me to make sure we have the capability to deal with it,” he said.
Working Toward a Permit
At the moment, the Department of Health continues to hold off issuing stop-work orders to the county — orders that, in any case, would not have much meaning on a project that is more than 90 percent complete.
Instead, according to Hirose and Lene Ichinotsubo of the DOH Office of Solid Waste Management, they have agreed that the DOH will consider issuing an after-the-fact permit for landfill construction and operation once Maui County provides it with as-built plans, quality control reports on the construction, and an operations manual. The first two of these items are due mid-year, with the deadline for submitting the operations manual the end of the year.
With the count not expecting to open the landfill until 2002, the DOH can have sufficient time to review the plans and operations manual, Ichinotsubo said. Still, both she and Hirose agree that the permitting process would have been a lot smoother had the DOH been given plans in advance.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 9, Number 10 April 1999