I-80 east of Salt Lake City is a beautiful mountain drive, yes?
Guess again, oh couch potatoes in the valley below.It's turned ugly of late, a fact that's news only to anybody who hasn't gotten out and driven up the canyon since about midsummer.
The Ogre of Road Construction has raised its head on both sides of Parleys Summit, and it's not a nice monster. Never is, really, but here the beast is unusually bad.
Why? Because the contractor is doing just what the state didn't want it to: closing down six steep miles of one lane in each direction for weeks on end while construction crews work on single, short stretches.
To repeat: entire lanes closed for miles while crews repave short stretches!
The Utah Department of Transportation is chalking up the Parleys project as a lesson it says will probably shape future road-building policy.
Which is a good thing, if you think about it. Delays in traversing the Wasatch Mountains were just what got the Donner Party in trouble, right? And who needs to relive that?
UDOT admits it goofed in letting the work out under a contract that allows 240 days for completion. That's about 30 percent or 40 percent more time than was actually needed, says Cory Pope, UDOT's engineer on the project.
Jim McMinimee, UDOT's chief engineer for Salt Lake and Summit counties, adds this insight: "The contractor has - how should I say this - kind of dragged his feet?"
McMinimee concedes there's too much time allowed in the contract but said the builder isn't doing anything to help, an assertion that triggered a response that was perhaps not the best reply in the annals of public relations.
"That's UDOT's problem," said Abdi Fatemi, the Gibbons and Reed project supervisor who is overseeing the work.
Fatemi said the contractor is doing what it's doing because, well, because it can.
But why so inconvenience the traveling public, which in recent weeks has crept up Parleys at 20 mph or less much of the time because lanes are closed with no construction people - working or otherwise - in sight?
"We do that for safety reasons," insisted Fatemi, though he might also have added that the company saves lots of manpower expenses by leaving barriers in the same place for days and sometimes weeks.
"We apologize to the commuters," said Pope, who apparently is versed in PR and said this example makes the perfect argument for a policy already on the books in California that fines contractors for closing lanes where no work is being done.
This assertive approach toward closure-happy construction companies has been tried a couple of times locally in the past two years or so, for resurfacing work on I-15.
One contract included a clause that said the builder would pay $40 a minute for every unnecessary lane shut-down.
It worked, apparently.
The contractor didn't pay any fines. And that's because money talked, telling him not to do what he wasn't supposed to do.