Washington Construction Law Blog

Seattle Business Monthly is out with its cover story on the 87 top business lawyers in the region, and I make the list.

ENR is out with a new article summarizing research by FMI on why contractors fail.  The research focuses in particular on the "psychology of contractor failure" and identifies certain red flags of potential failure.  One red flag, according to the study: a contractor executive who proclaims "we're right and we'll prove it in court."

So Seattle has two of America's favorite 150 structures according to an AIA poll -- the new downtown Public Library (#108) and Safeco Field (# 135).  Hey -- what about the Viaduct or the Space Needle?  Bridges & roadways must not have been included in the survey because the most sublime structure in our country -- the Golden Gate Bridge -- is sadly absent from the list.

Safeco Field is edged out by Wrigley Field (# 31), Yankee Stadium (# 84), Giants Stadium (# 104) , Fenway Park (# 113) and Camden Yards (# 122).

Why is the Viaduct tunnel option looking more and more like the Seattle Monorail project, whose death knell was unrealistic funding wrapped in shiny idealism?  This story is disturbing.

Washington State continues to weigh the various options for replacing the Seattle waterfront Viaduct, including a massive tunnel option.  Meanwhile, this news from the Big Dig tunnel fiasco in Massachusetts is a sober reminder of how things go wrong - very wrong. 

The old Miller beer plant in Tumwater (a/k/a the Olympia beer plant in Tumwater) has been under  new ownership.  That new ownerhip has been looking to launch a bottled water factory at the site.  Comes now the fairly explosive news, according to the Olympian, that the new owner is not what he appeared to be.  The headline summarizes its investigation:  "Brewery owner has criminal past."  At least one general contractor and several engineering firms are owed substantial sums of money for work performed to date, according to documents available at the newspaper's website.

Well, this is the opposite of construction. Worth a look, from last weekend's cooling tower implosion in Oregon.

A Sobering Thought: Six employees of the company supplying concrete to Boston's "Big Dig" have been arrested on criminal charges they falsified records to hide the poor quality of concrete delivered to the project.

...the costs of Bechtel's nuclear waste vitrification operation -- which has escalated in cost from $4.3 billion to $11 billion -- has become a political football of sorts in our Nation's Capitol.

As near as we can tell from this news report, Lease Crutcher will be held responsible for appoximately $5M of the $20M cost overrun incurred on Bellevue's troubled City Hall project. The City intends to pursue recovery against the design team for a "significant" part of the remaining $15M.

The re-development project at the old Olympia brewery in Tumwater has taken an interesting twist, as the City of Olympia has filed suit to condemn the property owner's water rights of 12 to 14 million gallons/day. From the Olympian:

Condemnation for a water right is rare, said Tom Loranger, a water resources manager at the state Department of Ecology. The last time it happened was in 1895.

The Idaho bid protest over project management services for the state's $1.2 billion road rehab plan, covered earlier in WCL, has ended -- not surprisingly with contract awarded again to the original winner (Boise-based Washington Group). PB dropped its protest.

Per order of the Supreme Court, Jeff Poole has been suspended from practicing law for a period of six months - followed by two years of probation.

Division I wasn't impressed by City Light's claim that spending $3 million on public art had the required "close nexus" to the agency's primary task of supplying electrical power:

The City's evidence consists only of broad, general statements about the applicability of the disputed projects to the goals of conservation and education without any explanation as to how the projects furthered these goals.

The most intriguing part of this article is not that the region's tower cranes are booked up, but that they are booked up largely on residential and mixed use projects - not office towers.

In an interesting conflict that pitted free religious exercise against historic preservation, First United Methodist Church (FUMC) has won the right to proceed with demolition of its existing church sanctuary located in downtown Seattle on a block also occupied by the Rainier Club. FUMC plans to replace the existing church with a 33-story office tower, the lower levels of which would house FUMC's office and human services facilities.

In legal terms, it's called abatement: removal of some offending condition or structure. In a recent King County Superior Court trial, the abatement doctrine was applied to require a downslope landowner in West Seattle to remove a pitched roof which disturbed a view easement enjoyed by the up-parcel owner and replace it with a flat roof. Said the Judge: "A defendant who commences and continues to build a project, while a lawsuit is pending which challenges the legality of such a project, continues at the risk of abatement."

Since this is my soapbox, I will shamelessly plug the anti-912 forces with this link. We either move forward or remain stuck in the quagmire of the status quo. It's that simple.