CDOT leader tied to Big Dig
Colorado’s largest-ever road project will break ground later this year, but the complex undertaking along Interstate 70 through northeast Denver still faces a steadfast corps of opposition that is skeptical of the $1.2 billion cost, questions the wisdom of the project and is indignant at its potential impact on the surrounding neighborhood.
Mike Lewis has been here before — and in some ways, the I-70 fracas has nothing on the controversy he weathered on Boston’s Big Dig.
The new executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation played key roles on Boston’s $14.8 billion Central Artery/tunnel Project, at one point overseeing design work. He ended as the project’s director for its final seven years.
Known colloquially as the Big Dig, the audacious highway project, finished in 2007, became the largest in modern U.S. history: It replaced a traffic-choked elevated highway through downtown Boston with an underground freeway, opening the space above to a ribbon of parks and some development. And it extended another freeway to the city’s airport through a tunnel beneath South Boston and the Boston Harbor.
But it’s the Boston project’s notoriety that has caught the attention of anti-i-70 activists here. It took nearly a decade of planning and then 15 years to construct, an epoch beset by delays and political turmoil that led to the ousting of top project officials — though not Lewis, who rose to the top job.
Massive overruns, in part due to big added components, nearly tripled the inflation-adjusted original cost estimate. (It was initially set at $2.8 billion in 1982 dollars.) For years, project defects grabbed headlines, including after one deadly incident.
For opponents of the I-70 proj-
ect, it’s irresistible to make comparisons that raise doubts about Lewis’ track record.
“You basically have someone who spent almost a decade overseeing the biggest boondoggle in U.S. history,” said Kyle Zeppelin, a developer who is a plaintiff on one of several lawsuits that so far have challenged the I-70 project unsuccessfully. He began criticizing Lewis’ ties to the Big Dig soon after his November appointment
But Lewis looks back with confidence on the Big Dig and all that the massive, technically complex project accomplished. It has relieved downtown traffic, at least, and revitalized parts of downtown.
“I’m proud of my involvement in it, as a civil engineer being responsible for the largest public works project ever undertaken in the country — both a technically complex project and in a politically very complex part of the country,” he said.
In an interview, Lewis, now 56, also discussed the project’s flaws. He acknowledged that he contributed to them during his 15 years working on it — while he and others did their best to make the many hard decisions they faced. And he said the Big Dig project happened in an era before the Federal Highway Administration required firm upfront budgeting and a financing plan for big projects.
Lewis went on to lead Rhode Island’s Department of Transportation for seven years before moving out west to take a deputy director job at CDOT in May 2015. Gov. John Hickenlooper appointed him executive director Nov. 20, after Shailen Bhatt stepped down.
Time in CDOT post may be short
In Colorado, Lewis knows he’s probably in for a short tenure. The next governor could replace him after the term-limited Hickenlooper leaves office next January.
But Lewis will have a hand in the next year not only in launching the I-70 project in Denver but in preparing a separate building program using at least $1.9 billion in borrowing authorized by the legislature for other highway projects throughout the state. Those are likely to include the widening of parts of Interstate 25 north and south of the Denver metro area and I-70 in the mountain corridor.
Zeppelin and other opponents of the I-70 expansion in Denver see the project, which also involves digging, as a potential boondoggle. CDOT leaders, Mayor Michael Hancock and other political leaders say the I-70 project is needed to help smooth traffic and replace an unsafe, aging viaduct.
The project, overseen by a CDOT project team and led by Kiewit Meridiam Partners — which CDOT selected last year for a public-private partnership contract — is expected to break ground this summer. Over four years it will add a managed toll lane in each direction along nearly 10 miles of I-70, from Brighton Boulevard to Chambers Road in Aurora.
Most of the project is garden-variety highway construction, but a 1.8-mile stretch closer to downtown poses greater challenges.
Between Brighton and Colorado boulevards, plans call for replacing the 54-year-old viaduct with a lowered span in a freshly dug trench. Groundwater and contaminated soil are among the potential challenges, along with keeping the three current lanes open in each direction most of the time. Next to Swansea Elementary, plans call for a four-acre landscaped cover atop the highway.
“You have this massive potential for cost overruns because you don’t know what’s down there until you reach it,” Zeppelin said, suggesting CDOT’S priorities should be on solutions other than expanding traffic capacity.
Lewis, for his part, resists close comparisons with the Big Dig, which he says had 5,000 workers at its peak. For four years, the project burned through $100 million a month. The I-70 project is “just not comparable,” he said.
Addressing questions about the Big Dig
Lewis was ready for questions about the Big Dig, the subject of a plethora of information online covering the project’s pitfalls.
“Some of it’s good, and some of it’s fake,” Lewis said in an amiable but thick-skinned tone, sitting at a conference table in his CDOT office. “Ask away.”
He recounted decisions and other project leaders had to make while accounting for sometimes far-reaching repercussions for 120 construction contracts. And he recalled tangling with investigative reporters from The Boston Globe, which shined a light on shortcomings in the project, sometimes reaching conclusions with which Lewis disagreed.
For instance: The Globe took project leaders to task in a 2003 series for not aggressively pursuing repayment from Bechtel/parsons Brinckerhoff, the project management consulting team, for its mistakes and misjudgments. The Bechtel team oversaw the project’s many moving parts day to day for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, and the newspaper reported that its investigation tied at least $1.1 billion in overruns at that point to mistakes made by Bechtel.
Lewis, who chaired a cost recovery committee, told The Post that he opted to wait to reconcile cost issues later, lest squabbling with Bechtel over money get in the way of the project.
“People can disagree with my theory on this,” he said.
Later, after the extent of overruns became public in 2000, prompting the firing of Lewis’ predecessor as director, elected officials stepped up recovery efforts.
Bechtel’s team and some other contractors in 2008 reached a $458 million settlement for project problems. Those included failing to detect faulty epoxy that was supposed to secure bolts but instead led to the collapse of a ceiling tile onto a car, killing a passenger — a public relations fiasco that stepped up public pressure for a payout.
A flash of controversy followed Lewis after the Big Dig ended. He took advantage of a controversial law that allowed higher early retirement pensions for state workers whose jobs were terminated through no fault of their own, a practice that state lawmakers since have curtailed. Lewis confirmed that he still receives that $72,578-a-year pension.
Some observers of the Big Dig credit project leaders for managing its complexity, despite construction errors, insufficient inspections and design failures.
“The joint venture team of the state, Bechtel/parsons Brinckerhoff, and lead contractor Modern Continental had to act like Matt Damon and his NASA team in ‘The Martian,’ continually confronting problems and figuring out ways to solve them on the fly,” wrote Anthony Flint, a former Globe journalist and fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in a retrospective essay on the project in late 2015.
David Luberoff co-wrote a 2003 book called “Megaprojects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment,” which featured the Big Dig as a case study. In an interview, he noted that Lewis was elevated to higher positions even as heads rolled — indicating that political leaders probably had confidence in his abilities.
“People chose to keep him on through two fairly dramatic transitions when there were clearly signals being made that things were changing,” said Luberoff, now deputy director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.
During his tenure at CDOT, Lewis has won some fans.
State Rep. Faith Winter, a Westminster Democrat who chairs the House Transportation & Energy Committee, praises Lewis for his expertise on transportation and his responsive to lawmakers’ concerns.
Lewis, who grew up in Montreal and later New Jersey, still holds Canadian citizenship and says he strives to be apolitical.
“I’m an engineer and a bureaucrat. And I don’t apologize for that,” he said, adding that he has worked under governors of all political stripes. “Politics is necessary, but in order for policymakers to make decisions, they need people to have the facts (and) lead teams that can resolve things. And I think that’s what I was successful with in my career.”