County hasn’t fully dealt with VMC mess

The mismanagement of Valley Medical Center’s construction program by Santa Clara County has become an unmitigated disaster for county citizens.

Under 2008 Measure A, voters approved raising and investing public funds to upgrade VMC facilities to meet state-mandated seismic safety standards. A contract was awarded to Turner Construction for $290 million to construct Bed Building 1, a 168-bed facility, with a completion date of December 2012.

Contract changes increased the contract price to $381 million by 2015, when work was suspended. A revised contract was signed in 2016, increasing the price by $85 million to a new total of $466 million and a revised completion by mid-2017.

If finished without additional price increases, Bed Building 1 will have cost $176 million more than the original contract price and be completed at least four and a half years later than planned. That is a 61 percent increase in the cost and more than twice as long to complete.

Boldt Construction was engaged by the county to review the reasons for the cost overruns and delays. The company issued the opinion that the county, not the contractor, was the cause of the delays and increased expenditures. Soon after the report was made public, the county dropped a pending lawsuit against Turner.

Aside from the obvious abrogation of professional responsibilities, there are significant ethical issues related to the county’s mismanagement of this project:

Transparency. It is incumbent n upon government agencies to be transparent, and Bond Measure A requires full disclosure of all spending from the measure. Over seven years, the extent of the cost overruns and delays was not shared openly with the public.

The Independent Citizens’ n Oversight Committee, whose members were appointed by the board of supervisors, was kept in the dark.

The county missed the n state mandated completion date of 2013, exposing vulnerable patients, including maternity and traumatic injury cases, to crowded and unsafe facilities for an additional four and a half years.

Voters approved $840 million n for Stage 1 of the program. To the extent that there are insufficient Bond funds available, county taxpayers will have to pay additional costs that they did not approve by diverting funds from other county programs.

The Board of Supervisors has the ultimate responsibility for the project. We call on the board to:

Identify staff members who n mismanaged the project and take appropriate action.

Develop staffing assignments n and procedures that clearly assign responsibility and authority to ensure that the project will be completed without further overruns and delays, and explain how this will be accomplished.

Develop and implement procedures n to professionally manage future construction projects.

Provide a complete accounting n of the cost for Bed Building 1, including the estimated final cost for all contracts related to the facility and for project management, legal fees, cost to VMC for the delayed completion, interest on the bond financing and any other costs for which taxpayers will be responsible.

Provide a realistic estimate n of all costs to complete the work funded by 2008 Measure A bonds.

We have made this request in a letter to the Board of Supervisors that is posted on our website, www.svethics.org.