Pictures of parkland surround the property still officially and once affectionately known as Luke Wood Park. Behind a decorated barrier, land has been cleared to prepare the property for the location of Lift Station 87, a project that could be described as the most controversial sewage project in Sarasota history. But despite the loss of park use and public access, no work to date has been done to bring the station out of the ground, even though plenty of ground has been razed to make room, and plans to put it underground have been entirely abandoned. So far, millions have been allotted to a project that has been in the making for 10 years.

ILLUSTRATION BY WOODY WOODMAN

ILLUSTRATION BY WOODY WOODMAN


It won’t be until mid-2019 before a working lift station operates on the land and not until late 2020 before the entire project is complete, presuming everything goes as planned—and to date little has gone to plan with this project. Cost estimates have steadily grown from around $4 million to more than $12 million to upwards of $25 million. In early June, contractors adjusted estimates again, telling city officials that it will cost another $32 million from this point on before everything is paid for and finished. The Lift Station 87 project has plagued three permanent city managers and a couple of interims, not to mention several utility directors that have come and gone from local government over the course of the project. When all is said and done, the city will own a station with an exterior that resembles the original Sarasota City Hall, and which will pump through it a third of the solid waste flushed down toilets within the city limits.

All the while, the city has continued to rely upon another lift station, located on Hudson Bayou, to continue serving as the most important flow point for sewage in the city despite long being determined an unreliable facility. Police at times have to guard Lift Station 7 around the clock thanks to investigated threats from neighbors angry about a lack of progress at the facility. And faith that things will improve has been rattled, if it ever existed in the first place. “If you are asking if I think that project has been well managed, I do not,” said Sarasota City Commissioner Susan Chapman.

Citizens in June got the most recent chance to slag the city over lack of progress—“we’ve been promised so often this will be done in two years or five years,” said Kate Kirby, “and there are always delays”—but the project nevertheless is moving forward. While officials have toyed with whether it made more sense to scrap everything and cancel plans to move the lift station at all, commissioners have held to this plan, always ultimately deciding too much time and effort has already been invested in this plan to turn back now. So efforts at the station move forward even as the costs seem to continually rise, with no certainty that the full cost, in dollars or political capital, has been estimated in full.

Catastrophic Spills

For Chapman, the fate of this station has been an integral part of her political career before she even considered running for a city government post. As the founding president of the Hudson Bayou Neighborhood Association, she got involved in lift station scrutiny circa 2004, back when she was the angry citizen complaining to city commissioners about problems. Chapman recalls she didn’t know much about sewer systems 10 years ago when a station near her home was malfunctioning, but she did know one thing. “I knew if you maintain a lift station, it doesn’t smell as much,” she says.

Lift Station 7 smelled a lot. Not so much as to annoy city utility workers—that’s a set of workers who can put up with an odor, after all—but enough to be a nuisance to nearby residents. And at first, dealing with a stink as a nuisance was the neighborhood association’s top concern. But then a significant discharge at the station occurred that demanded more attention. Soon, activists were uncovering more unsettling facts about city control on the lift station site.

The city did not have clear title to the land where Lift Station 7 stood, and the station was past its useful life. Discharges were bound to happen with more frequency. By the time a second discharge happened within a year, it was clear accidents weren’t being publicized, and neighbors were not being informed when problems did occur. Then a spill happened in February 2005. The lift station stopped properly pumping, and within hours, a rupture occurred by the Avondale neighborhood and 550,000 gallons of untreated sewage pumped directly into the Hudson Bayou. The amount was enough to prompt the state Department of Environmental Protection to start oversight procedures. The mishandling prompted two city commissioners to call for City Manager Mike McNees to be fired for failure to provide proper oversight and keep the public informed. The City Auditor and Clerk’s Office was tapped to investigate the situation, and come January of 2007, McNees resigned when it was clear a third commissioner was ready to join the call for his head.

Ultimately, the city decided it needed to not only close down Lift Station 7, but to put the new station in a different place, largely thanks to issue with title on the land and also because a modern lift station capable of handling so much sewage would end up towering over neighborhood homes. A variety of locations were considered, from unused lots in nearby neighborhoods to a vacant space beside the historic Sarasota High School, site of the coming Sarasota Museum of Art, but with the disaster at 7 fresh on mind, the city ultimately decided on the site furthest away from any homes or schools, smack in the middle of Luke Wood Park, on the other side of the bayou from the failing station.

That was hardly the end of controversy, though. The city hired Boyle Engineering, which later was acquired and merged into Aecom Technology, to find a way to make the move, and those firms said the city should install a clay microtunneling system along the floor of Hudson Bayou to move waste from one side of the water body to the other. Construction company Westra was hired to implement that plan, but in 2012 announced the plan as proposed was impossible. Just as previous firms had encountered when trying to install moorings in the bottom of Sarasota Bay, the contractors found the rocky foundation of the bayou incompatible with the microtunneling plan.

After investigation, city officials said engineers had failed them with a plan that didn’t properly take the environment into account. In November 2012, the city voted to go into legal proceedings against Aecom. City Manager Tom Barwin said the ultimate decision to end relations with Aecom came as delays in plans ultimately became too excessive. “We were hopeful final constructible plans would be submitted last Friday,” Barwin said on Nov. 6, 2012. “That did not occur.”

Litigation continues with Aecom, and the city has hired a new firm to run the project. Attorneys with Aecom have maintained they did nothing wrong, and watch the ongoing discussions about the future of this project with a close eye. An attorney even attended the most recent June meeting on the lift station. Discussion had to be abruptly brought to a close when legal strategy started to creep into the dialogue.

Robert Garland, vice president of McKim and Creed, said the firm is ready to move forward regarding construction of Lift Station 87. “The design has been completed,” he said. “What we have to walk the city through now is the best way to phase this that has the least impact on the schedule, but more importantly, how will we minimize the risk to the city?”

McKim and Creed earned just north of $1 million on designs, bringing the cost the city has paid thus far to rebuild and relocate the lift station beyond $9 million, but that is hardly the final bill. In 2012, the City Commission agreed to adjust estimates on the project to more than $12.9 million. Then officials last summer adjusted cost estimates for the project north of $25 million. Now new engineering explorations of the bayou’s ground have been conducted—twice to make sure lawyers in the Aecom suit had all the needed information—and the costs were upped to $32 million

The firm did offer a projected timeline in March with three phases: a microtunneling phase involving installation of a 36-inch microtunnel would take until around June of 2017 if it starts in July; construction of Lift Station 87 would start in September 2016 and run as long as until June 2019; and demolition of Lift Station 7 would begin in 2019 and likely be done in August 2020. Garland is confident the tunneling, which led to the schism between the city and the former contractors, can be done according to geotechnical investigation, as long as steel carrier pipes buried deep in the bayou are used instead of clay piping.

Engineers for McKim and Creed told commissioners that one of the biggest shifts in cost comes from installing work deeper in order to protect existing infrastructure. Aecom recommended a microtunnel under Hudson Bayou Bridge that would run 8.5 feet underground, but to make sure the bridge does not collapse, McKim and Creed engineers say the microtunnel should be made of steel and go another eight feet deeper into the earth. That’s because the bridge, standing since around 1915, has soft silt at its base and the tunnel needs to go deep in a limestone foundation under the bridge. City officials now believe the original microtunneling plan immediately under the bridge would have led to the bridge collapsing. Plans also now call for an above ground Lift Station 87, which Garland said was important to ensure the station remained operational through a Category 3 hurricane. He noted this station handles sewage from important facilities including Sarasota Memorial Hospital. “It is critical that after a hurricane, we can get utilities back online so residences and hospitals can function again as soon as possible,” he says.

Public Stink

The matter has led to divisions among neighbors as well. Chapman has since moved from being a prominent activist to a member of the Sarasota City Commission. For better or worse, both credit and blame for the project seem to stick to her more than any other official involved up to this point, if only for the fact that those most directly involved in missteps at City Hall 10 years ago have since been fired or retired and have left the city altogether.

But a sense of frustration has only grown. Central Park II Resident David Coe last fall voiced frustration that every step along the way for the project has been muddied by political wishy-washiness. Original plans for the lift station had it underground, but now it will be above ground. And the height of the structure has cost consternation and bewilderment. “The whole thing has turned absolutely chaotic,” Coe said. At a June meeting, Coe said he was ready for the city to just move forward with the project and stop second-guessing plans. New commissioners at the June meeting did explore the possibility, though, of stopping the effort altogether and just rebuilding Lift Station 7 in the area where it stood today. Commissioner Liz Alpert, who took office in May, called Luke Wood Park the “oddest location” to put a large lift station and questioned why the move would be made.

Matt Tidwell, Sarasota utility director, said rebuilding Lift Station 7 would indeed save money. That project would cost $15 million to $17 million compared to the $32 million to move to Luke Wood Park, but the land surrounding the existing lift station wouldn’t accommodate the structure as it has been designed in the new location. “It’s a much more compact site,” he said. The project would be taken all the way back to design stage, and that alone could take two years to complete before the city starts looking at a construction timeline. While Tidwell said the new lift station would be made to look attractive, it would need to stand 30 to 35 feet tall in a residential neighborhood, largely because certain features like backup generators would need to be put atop the facility instead of using land around it. “To some extent we have spread out horizontally with our design [at Lift Station 87], but we would have to be more vertical,” he said. And Garland stressed that all the workshops done with neighborhoods around Hudson Bayou and Luke Wood Park would have been for naught, the resulting designs scrapped, the engineering explorations made useless.

So what will the station look like when all is said and done? City Commissioners in May approved new plans for the lift station at Luke Wood that show the above-ground structure will look like the Hover building, the structure that served for decades as Sarasota’s historic City Hall. The city settled on this architecture after holding public meetings with residents in nearby neighborhoods.

“We know residents want to keep the project moving,” said Tidwell, “and now that we have a design, we’ll start the city’s site-planning review process.” McKim and Creed hired local architect Jack Christie to design the exterior of the building, according to Sarasota city spokeswoman Jan Thornburg. Christie has been working with Sarasota’s Urban Design Studio on the project. Sarasota had considered Spanish mission architecture and modern architecture designs as well. The building specifically harkens the Hover Arcade building, a Sarasota Bayfront structure that once surrounded a prominent fishing pier with two iconic 40-foot towers. The Hover building was purchased in 1917 by the city and officials ultimately moved all City Hall functions into the building. Municipal government moved into the current City Hall in the 1950s and the Hover Arcade was demolished in 1967, according to Sarasota History Alive.

But Chapman says she isn’t so concerned about the station’s “skin.” At this point, she fears the project may never get done. Chapman wants the city to hire a manager to oversee all parts of the complex affair, from installation of a tunnel under an aging bridge at Osprey Avenue to the opening of the new lift station and the planning for restoration of a park at Pomelo Place. This could add cost and time, but cut down the risk of further catastrophe. Regardless, Chapman, the citizen who demanded the move happen and the old lift station be taken offline, today seems as unenthusiastic as anyone about the project’s future. “Am I confident it will be finished in my lifetime? I am not,” she says. But city officials must continue forward. At this point, she said, they have no other course of action. SRQ