That is what WAFF called the Huntsville metro jail boondoggle.

Over budget and overdue, the Huntsville-Madison County Metro Jail is now a monument to your tax dollars at waste.

Already Huntsville and Madison County’s new metro jail is projected to cost $40 million over the original budget, $5.7 million of that just in repairs so far.

…

[A] document we found summarizing at least one of those forensic reports is a letter dated March 23, 2006, from CTL group’s vice president, adressed [sic] to Bruce Taylor, projects manager for for the city. The documents reads in part, “Specific concerns regarding the brace and connections and overturning of top most modules were addressed in a letter dated February 22, 2006 to the city of Hunstville [sic]. To date these concerns are unresolved.”

But construction continued, and until June 30, 2006, Dawson was still the builder under contract and Bruce Taylor was still the director of facilities projects, as David Wall remained the owner’s project’s representative.

…

City attorney Pter Joffrion did sit down with us to explain where this project went wrong.

“None of it was the city’s fault, it all occurred on the other side. It’s very clear now that not only were there design deficiencies, but significant construction deficiencies as well. Even a well trained project manager would have missed much of what occurred,” Joffrion said.

Joffrion’s “even a well trained project manager” statement is a frank admission that the city did not have a well trained project manager overseeing the project.  Who dropped the ball by saddling an unqualified manager to run the project?  The buck has to stop somewhere.

As predicted, Commissioner Faye Dyer is going to beat Glenn Watson over the head with this debacle.  She is now calling for an audit of the project.

Related content:

This entry was posted by Brian on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 2:39 am and is filed under Government Waste, Huntsville. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.