Quincy rejects payment to contractor for extra work
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald Quincy City Engineer Ariel Belino on Tuesday describes the problem the city is having with work done on the new police station by prime contractor Wellens Farwell.
QUINCY — The Quincy City Council voted unanimously Tuesday evening to reject paying an additional $23,000 to the firm that built its police station for work the company did that the city never authorized.
“It was not part of the contract, which is why we had a change order,” said Ariel Belino, city engineer for Quincy.
According to Belino, the contractor responsible for building the city’s new police station, Enterprise, Ore.-based Wellens Farwell, went ahead and installed an evidence locker in the police station despite instructions from the city not to install the locker.
Belino said the locker did not fit in its intended space.
“They told us, ‘The city ordered us to fix it,’ and I said no, we didn’t,” Belino told the city council Tuesday evening.
“And they did it anyway,” City Attorney Allan Galbraith said.
“And they did it anyway,” Belino echoed.
It is unclear who told Wellens Farwell to install the evidence locker, though Belino said a Wellens Farwell employee asked if the locker should be installed, and someone from the city — according to Belino, it was not someone in a position to actually make that decision — approved the installation work.
Wellens Farwell said no one would be available to comment on the Quincy situation until early April.
Belino told the Columbia Basin Herald that rather than knock down any construction work to make the locker fit, it would have been better for all involved to have waited for the delivery of the right-sized evidence locker.
“There was no problem with the installation, but it wasn’t part of the contractor’s scope of work,” Belino said. “It worked, but the problem is getting paid for the work.”
Last fall, the Quincy City Council voted to “delete phases 2 and 3” from its $5.4 million contract to build a new police station as well as remodel the city hall and library, over concerns that the contractor took too long to finish the police station, missing several significant deadlines in the process.
“I wouldn’t call it a dispute,” Belino said. “We’re trying to work out payment and close the project.”
The status of the rest of the contract, the remodeling work on the city hall and library, is still up in the air.
“I don’t know about the phase 2 process,” Belino said. “That’s up to the city council.”
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.