I hope everybody enjoys the Third Street Promenade grand opening
festivities Saturday. While you’re there look around. If you notice
that something doesn’t look right to you, I would agree.
By John McKay
I hope everybody enjoys the Third Street Promenade grand opening festivities Saturday. While you’re there look around. If you notice that something doesn’t look right to you, I would agree. I don’t think we have received the quality we deserve and some repairs are due.
We paid $3.8 million for one block of street improvement, which should translate into a lot of high quality work. I didn’t see that quality and sensed something was wrong so I reviewed the final construction documents. I think I have found discrepancies that deserve explanation or correction. Contractors should not be deviating from the construction plans.
First the concrete benches and walls. The original plans called for the “grooves” (reveals) on the side of these features to be 1/2-inch radius resulting in a uniform half round impression. You could take a 1-inch dowel and it would fit halfway into the reveal. The first time I saw the fresh concrete features they looked terrible with the reveals not aligning, among other issues. After that I noticed two coats of finish (skim coats) were applied that covered up some of the issues. These skim coats washed out the reveals and now you can see signs of the poor execution on the fountain too. When I asked city staff why they changed the surface finish I was told that this “skim coat” was actually a “sack and patch” repair so nothing was really changed. In construction circles a “sacking and patching” is the process of filling larger holes and voids (patching) and sacking (with a burlap sack) is the application of a very thin coat of sand/cement mixture to further fill small holes and make the finish more uniform, not change it. Sack and patch repairs look more like smooth natural concrete. What we ended up with is a change in material appearance, texture and color which was not as indicated on the plans.
The second issue is those parking spaces and nice steel posts with little sculptures on top. Did you notice that at one time most of those steel posts were leaning? Are we all that bad at parking? I looked at the drawings and noticed two things. First, those steel posts are installed only inches from the end of the parking spaces but were supposed to be 30 inches from the end. Second, the parking spaces are 20 feet long and match the plans, but appear very small. So we know that there is a problem with the steel posts but something doesn’t seem right about the parking spaces. The American Institute of Architects “Architectural Graphics Standards” states that an intermediate size car is almost 17 feet and that a large car is about 18 1/2 feet long. We have a lot of large vehicles in town. The “Standards” also indicate that the typical front overhang of a very small subcompact car is 2-feet, 6-inches. If the parking area is crowded you have about 18 inches to maneuver a large car into a space. I found that the California DOT Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices shows a 20-foot long parking space is indicated if an end is open for access but otherwise 24 feet was shown. These guidelines may not be law but they make sense. I wonder if city staff could come down with a couple of trucks and a car and show us how to park in these spaces.
I know many are disappointed with the overall look of the Third Street Promenade. Unfortunately, we can’t change the design but we can demand that we get the quality we deserve.
If you agree with all of this please write to the head of the Public Works Department, mayor or city manager. They need to know you care.
John McKay has been an estimator and project manager in commercial construction for more than 20 years and has lived in Morgan Hill for the last 10 years.
