Best laid plans

Since last September when a work crew began deconstructing Chico’s Downtown Plaza Park, a cyclone fence has kept the public from noting any progress with the million-dollar facelift.

All but two trees in the once tall-canopied park are gone, as is the old gazebo/stage, the crisscrossed sidewalk with the multicolored bricks, the green benches and the big boulder with a plaque to Chico founder John Bidwell fixed to its side. Even the grass is gone. Scattered pipes and fittings and other construction materials litter the landscape of ditches, holes and piles of gravel.

But slowly rising from the muddy remains various structures are beginning to take shape that will define the park for future generations.

Brian Vickery, job superintendent for BCM, the company contracted to do the work for the city, gave the News & Review a brief tour of the job site earlier this week. Vickery was the subject of this paper’s “15 Minutes” section a few weeks back and, a bit concerned that he’d come off as a cranky, foul-mouthed salty dog of a construction worker, he asked that we come back and check in again.

He wanted to explain in greater detail why the job is behind schedule and to try to share with the public some of the unexpected problems that have arisen.

“We started last September and we had to do X amount of things—put up a fence and start digging,” Vickery said. “The city was supposed to take out the trees. Then it came to pass they gave the trees to us to do.”

Vickery said that rather than just chainsaw the trees down, BCM decided to try to save them by pulling them out with roots intact and planting them elsewhere, including on their own property in Chico. The effort was about 70-percent successful, but very time-consuming, pushing much of the other work, including soil compaction, into the rainy season, further slowing things down.

“That put us about a month behind,” Vickery said.

At about the same time, they installed the fencing around the park, inside the sidewalk bounding the property. They needed to fence off a greater area, which meant closing off the inside lanes of Broadway and Main, and Fourth and Fifth streets to traffic. But to do that, the company needed a traffic plan.

“That’s so when the general public drives by, they don’t kill someone,” Vickery explained.

But waiting for the city to devise and issue a traffic plan proved to be another tedious delay, setting the project another month behind.

“The scope of the job, taking the trees out and traffic control slowed us down,” he said. “You got to get all your ducks in a row and that takes time.”

When they removed the surface pavement of the road lanes, they discovered 10 to 14 inches of concrete under the blacktop. That meant much more concrete had to be brought in and poured to match the existing subsurface of the streets’ profiles.

And if this weren’t enough, the company contracted to build an 80-ton concrete dome to cover the new bandstand pulled out at the last minute, leaving that complex job to Vickery and his crew.

Vickery designed and had built to specs a metal scaffold that will allow a worker to shoot concrete onto the metal skeleton of the dome. After it cures, which could take as long as two months, the massive concrete dome must be lifted by two 70-ton cranes onto the already-built back and side walls of the shell.

The dome will be lowered onto 22 pieces of rebar sticking up from the top walls that will, if all goes right, slip into holes drilled into the dome. Guiding the heavy concrete top onto the rebar and the walls will be a tricky job, Vickery said.

BCM is working with structural contractors Nichols, Melburg & Rossetto on the dome.

“I’ve never built a sphere before, or rather an ellipse like this. The other people sort of backed out so we were stuck with the bag. I’ve built walls, tunnels and bridges, lots of stuff, but never a round thing like this.”

Vickery said he was sitting in his office, temporarily housed in the Old City Municipal building across Main Street from the park, contemplating how they were going to build this dome. He got his inspiration, he said, from looking at one of the many hard hats hanging on the office wall. (Nobody walks onto the site without a hardhat.)

He drew up plans that include a metal track for the scaffold to ride along while the concrete shooter does his job. The metal frame has been built and is ready for the concrete coating.

“I still don’t know if it’s going to work,” Vickery said. “But at least we have a plan in place.”

The band shell, Vickery said, will be the centerpiece of the redesigned park, which he hopes will be finished by June.

Park Director Dennis Beardsley said he understands Vickery’s frustrations but said the complexity of the project is what has led to delays.

“Just like retro-fitting a house, you get into something like this and you find unexpected problems,” Beardsley said. “But they are making some great process right now and I’m still hoping it can be done by April, though I’m not going to pull out what little hair I have left if it’s not.”

Beardsley said the price of the park renovation sits at about $3.2 million with a contingency for overruns to cover unanticipated problems.

“I would say that at this point, just a slight bit of that contingency has been spent,” he said.