Liberty Bell Trail work delayed due to pandemic
>> If you’ve driven down Hancock Street past Stony Creek Park in Lansdale in recent weeks, you’ve likely seen the orange construction fencing.
That fencing surrounds a key upgrade to the park that borough officials hope to apply federal COVID stimulus money to fix.
“There’s a section of the Liberty Bell Trail in Stony Creek park that is currently under construction, and we are finding out that the soils underneath sections of the trail are not suitable for what we need them to be suitable for,”
said Borough Manager John Ernst.
“They’re very moist and waterlogged, so we are going to need to bring in some suitable fill. That’s going to have a price tag, and right now we don’t know what that is,” he said.
For much of the 2010s, borough officials have focused on completing the town’s sections of the Liberty Bell Trail, of paths that run from the southeast to northwest of town and link to other trail segments in adjacent Upper Gwynedd and Hatfield townships. A stretch of the trail running along Borough Hall at Railroad Avenue was opened in late 2019, a pedestrian bridge carrying the trail over a rail crossing south of the borough freight station was done in 2020, and another trail segment was completed with work on the Andale Green townhouse development on Hancock in 2016-17.
The Andale segment of the trail is meant to connect to Stony Creek Park via a pedestrian crossing on Hancock, and it’s just south of that street where the trail enters the park that’s the issue, Ernst told council’s administration and finance committee in early April. A freshly paved asphalt trail and newly built wooden pedestrian
bridge are largely complete, but it’s the earth below that has town officials worried — and the COVID-19 pandemic is to blame.
“The reason that this soil right now is unsuitable is because the project schedule had to slide, for this project, because of COVID. And that put construction into a different season,” Ernst said.
“Because we were through a winter season and now into spring, instead of the summer and fall previous, the soil out there is very unsuitable for the work that we need to be done,” he said.
When the arrival of COVID-19 in early 2020 led
state officials to order most businesses to close and construction to cease, work on the trail project was halted, Ernst told the committee. Borough officials have since learned that the town is eligible for roughly $1.6 million in federal COVID stimulus funds “to help offset costs incurred during COVID,” and plan to make the case that a fix for the trail project qualifies.
“We believe we can certainly justify the fact that COVID has caused a construction delay, which then pushed this into a construction season that was shifted, causing this increase in costing,” Ernst said.
In addition to the fill soil needed, costs have also
risen for the lumber and other construction materials needed, according to the manager, and early estimates are that costs are up by about $40,000 over the prior project estimate.
“While this is going to be coming through as a change order at the end of the project, for this work, we wanted to make sure council was very much aware of this. We will provide numbers as we get closer,” Ernst said.
Councilman Leon Angelichio added that he recalled a similar issue with unsuitable soil was encountered when the current borough
hall building was under construction in 2013-14, just a short walk up the trail from the current issue.
“We had the core drilled, and found out the grounds just would not support it. Not doing work like this is not an option, because at that point, any work you do on top of that, it’s building on a poor foundation,” Angelichio said.
“This is money that absolutely is well spent. It should be done. This is not a shortcut you want to take — savings today may double the cost of repairs tomorrow,” he said.
Council President Denton Burnell asked if the unsuitable soil issue could have been foreseen when biding out the project, if not for the delay: “It would seem like we did, in the sense we expected it would take place in a certain time of the year, when the ground is not soft.”
More detailed cost figures should be available by council’s May 5 committee meetings, according to the manager, and recent warm weather “has apparently made the situation a little better than we were anticipating.”
“We’re kind of taking it a day as a time as we move forward. We know there’s unsuitable soils, that have to be trucked out, and suitable soil filled back in. We have a ballpark number,
we’re just trying to figure out the final tally.”
Parks and Recreation Director Karl Lukens added during the parks committee meeting that the total change order cost may come in slightly lower than the cost for the soil, since staff and the borough’s engineering consultant are working to find savings elsewhere.
“The alternative is, we don’t do this, and we just have a big mud puddle where we used to have a limestone trail,” he said.
Both committees discussed the problem and the upcoming change order request on April 7, and councilwoman Mary Fuller put forward a motion on April 21 extending the completion date for the project through May 14, “due to the increased cost in lumber, and unsuitable soil to be removed, due to delays caused by COVID-19 and winter weather conditions.”
That motion was approved unanimously by borough council, and Ernst said he and staff will keep council and the public updated on future developments.
Lansdale’s borough council next meets at 8:45 p.m. on May 5 with various committee meetings starting at 6:15 p.m. For more information visit www.Lansdale. org.