Bridge Out

As I write, four orange-vested men tend a crane-hoisted funnel as it transports truckloads of slurry into a cavity at the north end of the Fourth Street Bridge. Filled, as it is, with iron-rich Kentucky gravel, the concrete will cure into a ballast heavy enough to gently lift the span when sailboats pass.

Whether the City Attorney's Office decides to levy fines against the contractor, and whether Mitchell-Obayashi decides to quit the job and have Matt Gonzalez sue, the work on the Fourth Street drawbridge will get done, either by current or substitute contractors. Next summer, light-rail trolleys will roll across the 90-year-old bridge connecting the Bayview, the new UCSF campus at Mission Bay, the surrounding biotech office park, and trains that head downtown. The Mitchell-Obayashi crew will clean up its construction detritus, and the venture's public spat with the city will be forgotten. But the feeling among civil engineering contractors that San Francisco is a high-risk client will linger on, regardless of the specific merits of this particular dispute. Millions of San Francisco taxpayer dollars will go to waste, because the city's dysfunctional contracting system will result in higher bid prices on the gamut of public works projects. And other worthy city programs and projects will go begging as a result.

I urge City Attorney Herrera to convene his proposed contracting summit as swiftly as possible, with a mind open to the notion that perhaps -- just perhaps -- there may be a smidgen of ineptitude in our city's contracting bureaucracy, and that there needs to be a better way of resolving contracting disputes than threats of fines and lawsuits and informal contractor boycott that has resulted from same. Once the complaints are aired, city public works officials and contractors may devise a more collaborative way of getting work done that also checks contracting fraud.

By improving its ability to build bridges between these groups, the city might improve its ability to, well, build bridges.