Town officials last week decided to put off payment to a Westchester-based architectural firm for services related to assessing the structural integrity and safety of the former Outback Teen Center building.
Members of the Board of Selectmen said at their most recent meeting that they would contact White Plains, N.Y.-based KSQ Design about $18,000-plus that the firm billed New Canaan after a different company concluded—incorrectly, it turns out, though also based on insufficient materials provided by the town itself—that Outback was structurally unsound and unsafe.
Selectman Nick Williams noted that an original report from Danbury-based Di Salvo Engineering Group did raise some confirmed problems with the Outback, “it also strikes me they made some mistakes the first time around.”
“Maybe we just call attention to it and say, ‘Hey, don’t do this again f you want to work in the town of New Canaan,’ ” Williams said at the sellectmen’s regular meeting, held Dec. 20 at Town Hall. “They put us in a tough position.”
Ultimately, First Selectman Rob Mallozzi said he would contact KSQ directly and find out “whether some kind of a discount is warranted.”
“I think we are pretty well-intentioned folks and I believe that we got ahead of ourselves because of the impact that that report had on a visceral level,” he said. “I think I can demonstrate to you folks and to the public at large that when we have had contracts before where a request could be open-ended, we have been unbelievably good about putting a restraint on it and it did not happen here.”
The decision to table a vote on approving the funds for KSQ followed objections raised by Selectmen Beth Jones. She said the board itself must be better about formally approving the funding of such work prior to that work getting underway, and that firms familiar with the town’s funding approval process also must be held accountable.
“My problem with this is still—and maybe somebody can explain it to me, I might be wrong—it’s with the process,” Jones said.
“As far as I see this, it is similar to the problem we had with the Lakeview Avenue Bridge. I didn’t think this contract or most of this work was approved prior to it being done. And the process was wrong. And I think it is something we have to be very, very careful about. We can’t let work be done and have us pay the bill after when the work was never approved to begin with. And I don’t remember and cannot find a record that this work was approved before it was done. And all of the players—I believe they did the work, I believe the probably deserve to get paid for the work—but they are all used to working for municipalities. KSQ knows the process. They have been working with us for years on all sorts of things, and they know you have to have a signed contract or an approval from the town bodies before you get paid for work you do, before it has to be approved, and I don’t think that was the case with this.”
In the wake of the July 19 engineering report that found Outback to have been poorly and incorrectly constructed, a handful of those who had been involved with the teen center as volunteers and/or donors pushed back on what they characterized as the unfair pinning of the building’s problems onto them.
It appeared from comments made publicly by one former board president that Outback officials had been made aware of an anomaly with the building that would be described as a safety hazard, according to the engineers who studied it in July.
Ultimately, as discussions about demolishing the Outback picked up, the Town Council hit pause and called for further review. The selectmen approved funds for an independent third-party study in October. Available here, the Dec. 6 study from Monroe-based DiBlasi Associates found that while problems such as with “powder post beetles” must be addressed, “we did not observe anything that would lead us to conclude that the building was either structurally unsound or unsafe for occupancy (from a structural perspective).”
“We would recommend that the proposed adjustments/repairs be undertaken and that the posts exhibiting signs of powder post beetle infestations be treated,” DiBlasi said in its report.
Selectman Nick Williams said that New Canaan in shuttering the Outback and moving quickly to assess its danger even as a vacant structure “did the right thing based upon wrong information.”
“Because at the end of the day, we were told the damn thing would fall down in a windstorm and it turns out that that was incorrect information and I think we should get to the bottom of that,” he said. “But my bigger issue is: What are we going to do, what is our endgame? What are we going to do with it as a town? I think we should start thinking about that now. We have it and we can repurpose it. I’m more interested in doing that than looking back and calling people out. That is not helpful.”
According to Jones, and as reported on NewCanaanite.com, some of the experts called back to Outback to review its structural integrity—including those who had designed and built it—originally had been said to be doing that work on their own dime.
Jones and Mallozzi both noted that the board had approved a $4,500 contract at one point this summer for a study of the Outback, but no more.
The situation appeared early on to be an emergency that “changed dynamic of the conversation” surrounding the Outback, Mallozzi said.
“Unfortunately, because of the magnitude of what they [Di Salvo] said, we were told by that original report that this building was going to be falling down, that it was an emergency,” Mallozzi said. “And the Board of Finance got involved and set aside money from a contingency so that we could act in accordance with a known and written basic emergency of the building falling down, so things cascaded as much due to the emergency situation that ended up not being founded, when we got to the bottom of it. It did cost us $18,000. I’m not proud of that.”
Jones said she wasn’t disputing the work anyone did in the aftermath of Di Salvo’s initial report.
“I’m not saying they should not be paid,” Jones said. “My only point is, on us, going forward, that I don’t think we ever approved a contract—$4,500 we did—but these guys could have come back and spent another 100 hours and handed us a bill for $68,000 because we had never put a number on something and approved it and said, ‘Yes, you can spend up to this amount or that amount.’ So, imagine if they handed us a bill for $150,000.”