Teamwork: Bad Example #2

Not surprisingly, site design is more complicated in an urban setting than at the urban fringes.  Existing conditions and the need to maintain traffic and utility service during construction are often significant constraints.  And those challenges can’t be solved in silos, but require broad coordination and cooperation.

Two months ago, I wrote about how effective urbanism relies on effective teamwork between the city, development team, and public.  Two posts ago, I gave an example of when the city/developer teamwork broke down.  I have another example to offer today.

As before, I’ll obscure the city, the project, and the individual involved.  There are multiple reasons for this decision, but the most important one is that the individual was a fundamentally good person responding to a flawed collective mindset.  And my goal is to improve the mindset, not to castigate the individuals who were seduced by it.

This is a different project than my last example, but is again a medium-sized mixed-use project in an urban setting.

But it was in a part of the city that wasn’t expected to be urban.  Although only a few blocks from downtown, the site had been industrial for nearly a century.  And consistent with the industrial use, earlier generations of city public work staff had aligned city utilities for maximum industrial utility and minimum construction cost, without considering the possibility of future redevelopment.

As a result, when the development team had to determine an alignment for a public street to front the proposed mixed-use buildings, there was no alignment that would contain all the existing utilities.  No matter how we looked at it, a major sewer line, serving a large area of the community, would need to be relocated.

The developer was a part of the decision, understood the intractability of the problem, and accepted the realignment as a cost of doing business.

We developed a reasonable conceptual plan for the realignment that was sufficient for the project to be entitled.  But one of the conditions of approval forced us to further adjust the alignment.  As we moved into the design phase, the question of sewer realignment and resulting adjustments to the other utilities remained an open question.

It was a dense utility setting, with complex storm drainage to be accommodated around the water, sewer, and dry utilities.  It was like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of which only five hundred pieces fit together, with the other five hundred to be carefully inspected and then discarded.

Given the complexity, I proposed to the city engineer that he review the drawings at 50 percent design completion.  He initially demurred, noting the city policy only anticipated reviews at design completion.  But I persisted, arguing that policy had been developed with greenfields in mind and that urban settings, especially with city utilities already in place and needing relocation, demand a more cooperative process.

The city engineer eventually agreed and reviewed the 50 percent drawings.

He offered relatively few comments, generally concurring with the decision on the sewer realignment, noting a few minor adjustments, and highlighting a couple of points that he wanted resolved as the design moved ahead.

It was an effective and helpful review.  I thanked him and the design continued onward to 100 percent completion, which was then submitted to the city engineer for his final review.

And he responded by directing that the realigned sewer be moved to the opposite side of the street, which would in turn force us to realignment the water, storm drainage, and dry utilities and to completely revise the storm drainage report.  It was tantamount to throwing away much of the second half of the design effort.

I’m not saying that his solution was wrong.  It was a fine solution.  It was a solution that I’d seriously considered and went the other direction only on the narrowest of margins.  Had we known the city engineer would prefer the other option, we’d have gone that way from the beginning.

But I’ll forever be puzzled by why the city engineer didn’t choose to make his preference known when he reviewed the 50 percent drawings.  He didn’t break any laws or city policies when he stayed silent.  But he broke a covenant to work cooperatively with developers, particularly on urban projects where the design decisions are multi-faceted and complex.

Perhaps some believe that the covenant doesn’t exist and shouldn’t exist.  But I think it’s essential to building better urban communities.

In my previous example of poor coordination, I noted that projects don’t die of a single cause, but instead succumb to a multitude of paper cuts.  This project was no different.  And the sewer realignment wasn’t even one of the cuts.  The project was already teetering before the city engineer made his wishes known.  A variety of other factors did in the project.  But the failure of the project was a shame.  It would have made the city a more vibrant place.

Before closing, it’s only fair to note that these examples of flawed teamwork are the exception.  Over three decades of civil engineering, I can point to far more examples of good coordination, although those examples aren’t nearly as entertaining.  I still recall a community development director calling me at home several times in one evening to resolve a thorny water pressure issue that resulted from a poorly written development agreement.

My point isn’t that good cooperation never happens.  Indeed, poor cooperation is the exception.  However, each instance of poor teamwork has a significant cost to the community.  The goal shouldn’t be for bad teamwork to be the exception, but for it to not exist at all.

My next blog post will leave my desk on the Fourth of July.  My practice is not to take off holidays.  However, as I’ve often done before, I’ll use the holiday post to wax philosophical, looking at the bigger picture.  And if you don’t choose to read my thoughts until after the holiday, good for you.  Have a great long weekend.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Teamwork: Bad Example #1

Two months ago, I wrote about the need for good teamwork as a requirement for effective urbanism.  Further cogitation led me to realize that I had good examples from my own career of the point I was trying to make.  Or perhaps I should say bad examples as the teamwork element was notably missing in the examples I’ll begin offering today.

In my examples, I’ll obscure the city, the project, and the individuals involved.  There are several reasons for this editorial decision, but the primary one is that I believe the individuals were fundamentally good people responding to a flawed collective mindset.  And my goal is to improve the mindset, not to castigate individuals who were seduced by it.

My first example was a moderate-sized mixed-use urban project.

I’ve often written about my concerns with CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act).  While I’m happy with the environmental improvements that have occurred under CEQA and hope that we can continue along the path set by CEQA, I have discomfort with several aspects of the CEQA process.

Foremost among those is the “completeness” process.  So that a city can have all necessary data in hand to prepare the environmental documents within CEQA timelines, the city can deem a land-use application incomplete until all required data has been submitted.

The process makes complete sense when the missing information is a traffic study or a hazardous material remediation plan.  But it veers into absurdity when the incompleteness item is a question about whether the pilasters are orangeish-pink or pinkish-orange.

Of course, there is a huge amount of grey area between those extremes, which often usually leads to lengthy lists of incompleteness items, developer irritation, and extended negotiation sessions.

This particular project included a pair of intersections.  One was a modification of an existing intersection along a major arterial.  The other, down a slight hill, was a new intersection where much of use was to be pedestrian and transit.  Any car traffic would be strictly local, enroute to nearby parking structures.

Accordingly, I directed that the conceptual design of the downhill intersection lean toward pedestrian safety, with tighter curb radii, sidewalk bulbs, and decorative crosswalks.  For the uphill intersection, I omitted some of those details, recognizing that the automobile would be the primary user.

I would have preferred if both intersections could have been pedestrian-friendly, but believed that my compromise accurately reflected the contemporary development zeitgeist.

Almost everyone in city hall concurred.  But one planner saw it differently and got his concern added to the incompleteness letter.  He thought that the downhill intersection, where most of the users would be pedestrians, should be designed to facilitate cars and that the uphill intersection, where most of the users would be cars, should be designed to facilitate pedestrians.

The intersection item was my biggest issue with the incompleteness letter, but there were a number of other items that irritated the developer.  So we found ourselves in a meeting room with the planner and city engineer reviewing the list.

Several times during the meeting, I returned to the intersection question, finding different ways to phrase the question to the planner, “So you want us to design the pedestrian intersection for cars and the car intersection for pedestrians?”

I had no expectation that the planner would change his mind, but I was hopeful that the city engineer would intervene, saying something like “If this project reaches construction design, I’ll require the original concept, not this revision, so let’s not waste the developer’s time and money.”  But the city engineer only pursed his lips and looked about the room, avoiding eye contact and apparently willing to waste the developer’s time and money to avoid internal conflict.

Some may ask why I tried so hard to save making a small change on the conceptual plans.  But the change wasn’t small.  Even at the initial approval, there must be a comprehensive infrastructure conceptual plan, including water, sewer, storm drainage, other utilities, and landscaping.  Making the requested intersection changes would have touched all of those.

Years removed from the situation, I don’t have good records on the costs that were incurred.  But $2,000 is a good guess.  Most developers would happily spend another $2,000 during the entitlement phase if the result was a better project.  But to spend $2,000 on a flawed concept that would be discarded at the next step?  That was ridiculous.  Nonetheless, that’s what we were forced to do.

When a project fails, the development team often points toward a single cause, such as city intransigence or lack of investors.  It’s a basic human need for a coherent narrative.  But the reality is that most projects die of hundreds of nicks and cuts.  Some of the wounds may be deeper than others, but it’s still a cumulative mortality, not a single fatal blow.

And that was the case with this project.  Bad timing in the marketplace, investors waffling on their commitments, a land ownership dispute.  They all combined to end the project, with the unnecessary intersection redesign only one among many nicks and cuts.  But it was a nick that still rankles years later.  And the reason that it rankles is that the project would have made the city a better and more financially resilient place to live.

I had a second example that I’d planned to share today, but I’ve written long.  My next post will return to the topic of neighborhood block parties that I raised several weeks ago.  After that, I’ll offer my second example of bad teamwork.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)