Forget It Jake, It's Baltimore

Chinquapin Run

From the Baltimore Banner, Why the city says work to restore a Northeast Baltimore stream went $14M over budget

A tiny creek weaving through Northeast Baltimore has cost the city a lot of money.

In part, the city alleges in a lawsuit filed last month, that’s due to the oversights and errors of a contractor it hired over a decade ago to plan the environmental engineering for the stream known as Chinquapin Run — shoddy work Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration now says has cost the city nearly $14 million extra.

The work on Chinquapin Run, a tributary of Northeast Baltimore’s Herring Run, is required under a long-standing U.S. Environmental Protection Agency mandate that the city address backups and overflows in the sprawling system of pipes that collect its sewage and deliver it to wastewater treatment plants.

In this case, the city tried to kill two birds with one stone. Since these sewer lines often run under low-lying areas like creek beds, repair on sewage lines sometimes happens alongside work to rehabilitate and restore tributaries like Chinquapin to control stormwater runoff — another requirement under state environmental regulations.

But the work at Chinquapin Run didn’t go according to plan, the city says, in part because of sloppy work by the consultant it hired to scope out the area, the global firm AECOM Technical Services. The project itself dates to 2011, when the city hired a company for the planning called URS Corp., which was acquired three years later by AECOM.

Among them, according to the lawsuit, AECOM gave bad estimates for the types and amount of rock the city’s contractor would have to excavate to install a sewer line, misinformation the city says cost it an additional $6 million. The company failed to identify five tributaries feeding into Chinquapin Run that needed work to control erosion and sediment flows, the lawsuit adds, resulting in a citation by environmental regulators, and its worst case predictions for storm scenarios were off-base, leading to nearly half-a-million dollars in damage and recalibration work when a bad storm came through. The tally of trees AECOM said needed to be removed to make way for the work wasn’t even close: It undercounted by more than 700.

In all, the city says its contractor billed an unexpected $13.8 million for the additional work — a cost overrun the Scott administration argues was AECOM’s fault.

It is Baltimore. What are the chances that some kind of kick backs are the problem?