By Randy Kugler
City Officials are scrambling to control the narrative on what is becoming the debacle on the Classic Street reconstruction project. Here’s a summary to date:
In August 2024, the City Manager issued a Request For Proposals allowing engineering firms to provide proposals for professional engineering services and construction administration. The request included the unusual requirement that “all proposers must have been in business as their current entity for at least five years”. This effectively eliminated North Coast Civil Design, a local firm with 25 years of experience including the design, overview, and construction administration services for the Dorcus Lane Reconstruction Project. North Coast Civil Design was viewed to be in existence in their “current entity” as a business for 3 years thus effectively preventing them from even submitting a proposal for consideration.
City officials retain Windsor Engineers from Portland, pay them $424,000 for presenting a project to the community for 2,000 feet of road widening, a new 10 ft. wide paved pedestrian path, over 3,000 ft. of new water main, over 1,000 linear feet of retaining wall for the extreme slope along the west side of Classic Street, and stormwater improvements. Unfortunately, key provisions of that design will not now be built and Windsor Engineers was removed from the project with no public explanation. City officials now decide to select North Coast Civil Design to salvage a project that squandered both time and money. No explanation given as to why the 5 year prohibition preventing a submittal a year ago was no longer relevant.
Classic Street is defined as a Minor Collector street due to the volume and type of traffic it carries and as such is required by City Ordinance to have minimum eleven foot travel lanes. City officials plan to ignore their own Ordinance requirements and maintain the existing 10 foot travel lanes for a considerable portion of the project. The 2 foot wide landscape buffer that was designed to separate vehicle traffic from pedestrians has been eliminated thus maintaining the existing unsafe conditions for bikers and pedestrians.Despite the fact that Councilors take an oath to uphold City Ordinances, when that oath becomes inconvenient, they simply ignore it and hope no one notices.
Perhaps the most important element of the project identified by Windsor Engineering was the need for a retaining wall or other suitable engineering measures along the steep slope that forms the west boundary of Classic Street. The Windsor consultants noted the pavement condition along the west side of Classic Street and confirmed that the underlying base is moving or otherwise failing. There will be no retaining wall built to arrest this movement which will only be exacerbated by the increasing levels of traffic on Classic Street in the years to come. The exact condition of the existing road base is also unknown. Old timers recall when the original road base was put in with substandard materials including old tires and the City then failed to overlay the road base with sufficient asphalt.
The City continues to pay legal fees and awaits a verdict out of Tillamook Circuit Court resulting from a prospective bidder who alleges the City engaged in an improper bid process. The City Manager claims that visitors pay for most of our infrastructure improvements yet not a single dollar of Transient Lodging Tax money from those visitors has been budgeted for this project to assist funding the construction as recommended by the Windsor consultants to create a long term stable roadway with sufficient width to provide safe conditions for pedestrians and bikers.
No announcement from the City as to when the new design which bears little resemblance to the one presented last year, will be presented to the public at a meeting for review and questions. Also, a firm cost for the above described project remains unknown and likely will need to be increased if some of the unknowns need to be corrected. After all, what could possibly go wrong?