| Cro Burnham |
Nov 9, 2015 7:13 AM |
I wonder who the site inspector was back when the original demo contractor was supposed to have been removing all that stuff.
As I understand construction management (OK, not so not terribly well), in general, it is a very good idea - and a common practice on many large contracts - to hire a competent and trustworthy expert whose job it is to make sure that the contractor is doing what they say they are doing . . . and to report back to the owner the findings; then the owner may withhold money until the job is completed as specified in the contract and verified by the third-party inspector.
Assuming the original contractor didn't perform the job as specified in the contract, that seems really crummy and dishonest. But you have to wonder if the owner/managing partner at the time either never hired an inspector who might've advised that the contractor was cutting major corners, or hired a really sloppy and/or lazy inspector who never bothered showing up at the site to check in on what the contractor was actually doing. Cause it sure looks like that dirty ol' contractor did not do very much at all.
I think it was that Mahoney guy who owned the site back then, and maybe Lenfest was an investor with Mahoney. My recollection is that Mahoney hadn't done much if any prior city stuff, but I may be off on that. From what I recall reading, it seems like Mahoney and the owner of the Ritz (Craig Spencer) kind of may have hated one another and endless litigation seems to have consumed everyone's attention at the time.
Anyway, I wonder if, when Lenfest bought out Mahoney, it was somehow represented to Lenfest that all this site work had been completed when maybe no competent inspector had ever actually checked out the work while it had been in progress.
I mean, looking at those photos, how could an inspector have missed that stuff? It looks like someone buried megaliths from Giza under that lot.
I wonder what kind of engineer does the testing of the site to verify whether or not underground structures will need to be removed. Seems like something someone would have investigated for at some point in the past few years while planning for the current project.
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