Dive Brief:
- The Broward County (FL) Board of County Commissioners is set to decide whether general contractor Tutor Perini will be a part of the construction team on its new convention center hotel, the Sun Sentinel reported.
- Tutor Perini and the county are currently trying to resolve change order and delay disputes on a new Fort Lauderdale courthouse and traffic tunnels at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
- County officials said the resolution process with Tutor Perini, which is part of the Matthews Southwest Holdings Inc. hotel development team, has been a "very, very difficult process," and some commissioners said they should rethink allowing the contractor to work on another project.
Dive Insight:
Commissioners said their primary concern is that the current Tutor Perini disputes will end up in litigation, but a Tutor Perini representative told the Sun Sentinel that he believes any points of contention will be resolved "amicably." Some commissioners have also said they don’t want to give so much of the county’s work to one contractor, and another said subcontractors are not being paid on existing Tutor Perini projects.
According to Tutor Perini, the county owes the contractor $11.3 million for extra work on the courthouse and $40 million for changes and delays on the airport, the Sun Sentinel reported. The county said Tutor Perini owes it $34.6 million and threatened to withhold the amount from any future payments, the details of which county officials outlined in a scathing December 31 letter to the company's Tutor Perini Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Venture.
Tutor Perini also was at odds with Washington State Department of Transportation and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee earlier this year. The state suspended the digging operations of Seattle Tunnel Partners — a joint venture between Tutor Perini and Dragados USA — on Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct project after a sinkhole and tipped barge raised questions about the integrity and safety of the site. STP said the stoppage was "wrongful and unjustified" and plans to bill the state for millions of dollars in delays, according to The Seattle Times. After an almost six-week suspension of work, tunneling restarted at the end of February.