Acronym

Barely four weeks left until the most recent deadline and it is becoming increasingly evident that it too will be missed. Sure, more of the alignment has been paved in the last three weeks than the three months before, but there is still much road to build.

Design changes still stumble into my tiny office, demanding my attention and disrupting my detailed p(f)iling system. Project meetings occur with increased frequency, stealing time better spent. Adjacent property owners lament with greater urgency, fearful that they will be forgotten behind the settling dust cloud.

Despite all this, I only work half days - six in the morning to six in the evening.

This bit comes from Rob, an Australian on his first overseas gig, Project Manager for one of the box culvert contractors. If you give him enough time, he will also relate to you the story of one of his laborers, chastised for arriving an hour late to work, then discovered leaving the job site an hour before the day was scheduled to end. In his defense, “No, mon, mi caan be late twice ‘pon de same day.”

I should kick him off the job for jokes like that, but he is one of the very few truly competent contractors that we have here, and the only one whose works are not on the critical path. Each of the others is somehow delaying one or more contracts through inexperience, incompetence, inefficiency and ineptitude.

The worst of these is the Public Works Department.


I am still not entirely sure how a government entity got the work to start. After all, the bastardized project packages were to have been awarded based upon competitive bidding from private contractors. It could be that something is not quite right with the subcontracting process. I have heard, from a reliable source, that the above box culvert contractor had also bid on the bridges, but was asked to withdraw, leaving only one contractor submitting tender documents. And I am sure that it is only a coincidence, but this sole bridge bidder is partially owned by the some very well placed politicos.

For the record, we had nothing to do with this clusterfuck, as the Client severely limited our participation in the entire reapportionment and rebidding process (meaning: he kicked us out of the meetings).

In light of this, and in light of the fact that nothing surprises me here, twenty percent of the work was awarded to the same guys who have built most of the crap roads across the island over the last thirty years. We were informed at that time that the Public Works Department was going to set an example for all the other contractors. They set an example all right, but not one to emulate.

Their tender shows an obvious lack of understanding of the work to be performed, as their prices often times have no bearing in reality. For instance, they bid a mere JA $1,120,000 for traffic control, representing 0.36% of their total bid for their earthworks, subbase and base contracts. Assuming ten hour days, a fifteen month contract, and a 100% mark up on labor, this represents the full time employment of about a flagmen and a third, with no consideration for the occasional sign, cone, or barrier.

They consistently express surprise and amazement each time something new is revealed to them about their Contract. “You need shop drawings?” “We have to compact pipe backfill?” “There are elevation requirements to the roadway?”

The source of their ridicule, however, is not limited to one foreign consultant. Like all public works departments before them, the taxpaying public believes that there is very little real work to come out of them. So, tired of this abuse, the PWD recently hired an image consultant and was reborn as the National Works Agency, or NWA.

Almost immediately, our inspectors were referring to them as the Night Work Agency, because they were never seen working in the daytime.

Similarly, if one did not award them the benefit of assuming they were at their tasks after dark, the NWA could also be referred to as the Not Work Agency.

So I put together a little contest among the Company expatriates and select local staff, and gathered a few more, including:

No Workers Around. It follows. And bears much truth, as they rarely get started until mid-morning, and change work areas so often that they can never quite complete the final five percent of any task.

Not Working at All. Sense a recurring theme?

No Won Around. This fubar project would never have been in these straits if The Contractor had not suffered their own financial difficulties at the start of the job.

Numbskull-Wastrel Alliance. This one was mine. I cannot begin to count the number of times that I slam handset to cradle accompanied by the concise statement of, “Moron!”

New Welfare Alias. This one was also mine. A bit too subtle for the masses perhaps, but historically, public works departments the world over have been used for patronage employment. I have no fear of the National Works Agency making any changes to this grand tradition.

Nursing Wasted Assets. It is all too clear that they are wasting assets, reworking areas for weeks trying to make grade. First they are too high, then too low, then too high, then too low, and by the time they make the grade, the aggregate is completely segregated. Too often, they have no funds so, instead of scaling back their operations and concentrating on a small portion of the works, NWA will keep every piece of equipment and every bit of manpower enabled, then not buy materials, and end up spending the day rolling back and forth over completed works. Now, would their lack of monies have anything to do with the fact that they have not given me a payment application to review for more than five months?

No Way Ahead. They will not be the first contractor to complete their portion of the project. No way. One of the more enlightened souls in the Agency suggested to me the other day that Jamaica needs to hire only foreign contractors to build roads for the next decade. This, he opines, would show both government and People how these things are supposed to be constructed, so the People would erupt if ever again the NWA tried to perform in their historic manner.

… and finally,… Never Work Again.

We can only hope. Read More......