Dirty Pool

(In San Francisco, it can be useful to have a mentor, especially one as savvy as Hayes, who has earned $3 million during the last decade for acting as a "liaison" between the Department of Public Works and the Bayview-Hunters Point community. In other words, Hayes is paid for hosting community meetings about Public Works projects that the city wants to build in Bayview-Hunters Point. He also "monitors" Public Works contractors for compliance with affirmative action rules, a duty that is normally the responsibility of city employees. Several years ago, Hayes earned a little unwanted air time when a television news reporter revealed that his company was billing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars for an "odor control specialist" to sniff sewers. BDI is also a partner in the construction management company supervising a San Francisco International Airport expansion project that is more than a billion dollars -- with a "b" -- over budget.)

City Engineer Harlan Kelly says he kicked Taylor off the pool job because he stopped showing up. This happened after the city had paid Chiang $518,000 for Taylor's work, some of which had been rejected as low quality. Hayes seemed surprised to hear that Chiang had been paid so much money; apparently Taylor had been hard pressed to pay his workers. Taylor did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment.

After Taylor's firm left the pool job, Chiang's firm took over the concrete work. Quality problems continued to pop up. The city Department of Building Inspection complained that some of Chiang's structural steel -- used to reinforce concrete walls -- was rusty and made him throw it away. City inspectors rejected Chiang's poured concrete work on several occasions.

City records show that Overstreet, the pool's architect, has long expressed serious concerns about the quality of the concrete and steel work. Overstreet complained that Chiang used substandard material to make the forms into which concrete is poured, and that he did not test the concrete properly. When a dirt wall inside the pool collapsed as structural steel was being installed, Overstreet demanded a written assurance from Chiang "guaranteeing the structural integrity of the pool wall." After documenting a string of complaints about Chiang's concrete and structural steel work, Overstreet wrote in a memo last summer, "It appears that every week we are running into new problems. ... Our concern is one of quality and overall safety of the facility. We do not need to enumerate the vast problems we have encountered."

Chiang did not respond to telephone calls requesting comment. When approached at the pool job site, he walked away without comment. His site supervisor, Rob Ho, said he could not talk about quality problems, or why the job is a year late, because, "I don't have time. This is a construction site. Every minute is accounted for in advance."

As concrete problems continued, the city paid C.M. Construction extra money to fix the mistakes, while paying its own employees at least $800,000 to watch over the contractor. And even ignoring matters of concrete, this construction company -- and, it seems, a whole lot of people working on the MLK pool -- could use watching.

A partial list of other MLK pool ills documented in the public record would read something like this:

- When the project bogged down in August 1999, the city spent tens of thousands of dollars to buy Chiang sophisticated scheduling software manufactured by Bidcom Inc. of San Francisco. When computerization failed to bring the project up to speed, the city paid $100,000 to Don Todd Associates, a local construction management company, which assigned five people to help Chiang write a schedule. Nonetheless, Chiang continued to fall a day behind for each day he worked; that is, after he was on the job for a year, he was a year behind schedule.

- Against the strong protests of the subcontractor who installed the actual swimming pool, representatives of the Recreation and Park Department insisted on spending $50,000 extra for brass fittings in the drainage system. Dennis Berkshire of Aquatic Design Inc. (which did consulting work on the MLK pool job) says this extravagance will cause massive permanent stains on surfaces of the pool shell. He says nobody uses brass fittings in public pool construction because cheap, non-staining, plastic ones do the job just fine.

- The city spent tens of thousands of dollars extending and repouring the shallow end of the pool because it was too deep for children to play in safely.

- Dirt excavated from the hole destined to become the pool had been slated to be used as fill under the foundation. Chiang, apparently, piled the dirt haphazardly about the job site, making it difficult, sometimes impossible, for subcontractors to work. Then, the dirt got soaked in the rain, spoiling it for future use and, ultimately, costing the city $150,000 to replace.