Breakup: TII contract severed

Call it an OK breakup. The contractor hired to upgrade the telecommunications infrastructure at Chico State University is off the job, leaving work undone in what the school is characterizing as an amicable split.

“It was an accumulation of a lot of areas of the construction,” said Dave Kimbrell, the university employee who is managing the Technology Infrastructure Initiative, or “TII” project. He called the project “poorly managed” by the contractor, Mallcraft.

“The contractor just fell so far behind in schedule,” he said, and that, coupled with there not being “enough qualified people on staff,” left the university with no choice but to pursue severing the relationship.

“The university wanted to split and part ways on a good note—a friendly note,” Kimbrell said. The agreement was cast in a Jan. 14 meeting that included a representative from the California State University Chancellor’s Office. As part of the deal, each party agreed not to sue the other for costs, and, “We part ways absorbing our own costs,” Kimbrell said. The contract for underground work and interior cabling was $10.7 million, with a $2.8 million contract to follow for networking equipment.

Dave Olmstead, Mallcraft’s manager for the Chico State project, refused to comment. He referred questions to a Jerry Fishbein in the company’s Altadena headquarters. Asked about the severing of the contract, Fishbein said, “It’s possible. I won’t know for a week,” and hung up in the middle of a followup question.

The TII project, which will provide wiring and other infrastructure for the university’s current and future needs, has been ordered by the Chancellor’s Office and is funded by a state bond measure.

The 20-month project was slated to be completed in March 2004, but Kimbrell said it’s running seven months behind and will now take another 11 to 12 months to complete.

With an initial planned start date of July 2001, the project had already suffered delays after funding stalled and then when the university’s original contractor, Glumac, dissolved as its parent company, Enron, declared bankruptcy. Then, weather was poor and planning took longer than expected.

Besides the delays, Mallcraft had been at the center of a series of apparent missteps, including the improper treatment of artifacts unearthed during trenching, safety issues and an incident in which Mallcraft employees went off-campus and had extra keys made to campus buildings. Kimbrell said the contractor had been issued a limited number of master keys and forbidden to make copies.

Legally, public entities have little choice but to accept the lowest responsible bid in construction projects. A couple of years ago, Mallcraft left a project at Humboldt State University on bad terms. That job was plagued with power failures, gas leaks, environmental concerns—even a car stuck in a trench.

Kimbrell said he wished Humboldt had reported its troubles with Mallcraft earlier on, so the company could possibly have appeared on a grievance list at the Chancellor’s Office. “We’ve started an evaluation ourselves already,” he said, “so our other campuses are protected.” The CSU’s Web site still lists Mallcraft as a prequalified contractor for TII projects.

The university is now hoping that the project is far enough along (entering the sixth of nine phases, the pulling of cable) that it can supervise existing subcontractors rather than go out to bid again for a general contractor.