Staff writer
Despite the fact they might have been penalized as much as $51,000 more, a construction company hired for improvements to East Park asked Marion city council on Monday to reverse its stance on penalizing them $9,000 for delays in finishing the project.
The council in October voted to enforce a liquidated damages clause in its contract with Trinium, Inc., of Manhattan, docking the company $9,000 for finishing the job 15 days late.
Jarrod Willich, vice president of Trinium, spoke to the council Monday, asking that the $9,000 penalty be removed.
Willich said delays in payments from the state for the grant-funded work caused Trinium to lose subcontractors working on the project over non-payment to them.
“On this particular project, Trinium’s subcontractors moved on to other projects due to not being able to get paid in a timely fashion,” Willich said. “Once Trinium received payment, payment was made to the subcontractors immediately, but it took a considerable amount of time to get subcontractors back on the East Park project as they had to finish the other projects that they were working on.”
Willich said there were communication problems with the project administrator.
Mayor Todd Heitschmidt said he believes the problem stems from management issues at Trinium, but he’s willing to hear all sides of the story.
Heitschmidt told Willich the city would review communications between the city and Trinium to see if information on billing requirements was provided.
“We appreciate your coming and we appreciate your request. We’ve got three parties involved, we’ll look into it further,” Heitschmidt said.
Darin Neufeld of EBH Associates told the council the reason Trinium didn’t get paid timely is because their paperwork was not filled out correctly.
City administrator Roger Holter said although the city counted nine days liquidated damages, the contract would have allowed 60 days to be counted.
City commissioners took up a long-unresolved matter of land formerly belonging to the railroad. The land, southeast of the city library, has been in question since 2015, when two landowners, Pat Carr and Mike Loomis, wanted the property, which adjoined the property of both. The city had a survey done to resolve the matter and one of the property owners didn’t pay his agreed-upon half of the survey costs.
Council members voted to sell the land to Carr for $750, his half of the survey cost.
In other matters, the council approved publication of the 2016 fourth quarter financial summary report, passes a resolution waiving statutory generally accepted accounting principles when preparing financial statements and reports, appointed Dorothy Youk to the housing authority and Debbie Steele to the historical museum board, and heard an update on workers compensation insurance renewal.