Now 14 years and counting, Stony Point Road widening hits latest snag

The widening of Stony Point Road has hit another speed bump, setting back for several more months completion of one of Santa Rosa’s longest running public works projects.

A design error has caused about 900 feet of curb and gutters to be installed by the contractor along the west side of the road but at the wrong elevation.

It’s not clear who is responsible for the blunder, but the work will have to be torn out and redone in coming weeks and months at a cost of about $300,000, according to city officials.

It’s the latest setback for a project whose delays and continued inconveniences are starting to get on drivers’ and residents’ nerves.

“There’s (thousands) of people a day that go up and down that road and we’re just sick of it,” said Greg Grubin, who lives near Airfield Park and passes by the project nearly every day.

The design error is reminiscent of a 2014 screw-up by Caltrans as it widened College Avenue under Highway 101. Sections of new roadway were off by as much as 2 feet and had to be reconstructed at a cost of $1.2 million.

In that case, a long gap between the design of the project and its construction and a conversion error from metric to English units were cited as explanations for what city officials labeled a “debacle.”

The Stony Point Road work is another high-profile project going sideways for Bay Cities Paving and Grading, Inc. The Concord-based company is the same outfit that is building Healdsburg’s much-?maligned $10 million roundabout, which is now a year behind schedule and causing endless disruption for local drivers and businesses.

But for the Santa Rosa project, the latest holdup does not appear to be the fault of the contractor. Bay Cities installed the curb and gutter “consistent with the plans” completed for the project, said Jason Nutt, the director of the city’s Transportation and Public Works Department.

The plans were wrong due to “a water line not being at the elevation that we thought it was,” Nutt said.

It’s not year clear why the location of the water line - which is owned by the city - was misidentified in the plans. Those conversations are going on between the city’s in-house design team and the civil engineering firm that completed the drawings, Santa Rosa-based GHD.

Neither GHD nor Bay Cities responded to a request for comment Friday.

Since the water main was 6 inches to a foot higher in elevation than the plans reflected, there wasn’t enough distance between the pipe and the base level of the roadway, explained city engineer Steve Dittmer. Having enough fill material between the road base and the pipe is important to protect the pipe from the downward forces of heavy trucks traveling on the road, he said,

The error also affected drainage for the roadway, forcing a complicated recalibration that had to take into account the location of culverts in relation to a neighboring trench for gas and electricity lines, Dittmer said.

Stony Point serves as a major alternative to Highway 101 for those traveling between Petaluma, Rohnert Park and Santa Rosa.

The plan to widen it was adopted by city leaders in 2004 to relieve congestion, particularly at the intersection with Sebastopol Road, which is crossed by more than 50,000 motorists a day.

The upgrade was viewed as a crucial infrastructure improvement to handle existing capacity from the new homes and apartments built in the area in recent decades and to help it accommodate more growth.

The project has been a challenging one, involving the purchase and demolition of 13 homes to make way for the widening. A significant amount of work to put high voltage electric wires underground also took place.

The first phase of the project, from Highway 12 to Sebastopol Road, got underway in 2009. The recession held up the second phase, which finally got underway in August 2015.

The expansion is adding travel lanes in both directions, continuous sidewalks, bicycle lanes, improved traffic signals and crosswalk improvements.

The second phase was supposed to be wrapped up by the end of 2016.

But the wettest winter on record in Santa Rosa set that timeline back significantly.

Another issue arose over the need to widen the culvert carrying Roseland Creek under the roadway, Nutt said.

The problem with the latest setback is that the contractor was working toward completion of the work in the fall when the design error was discovered, pushing the project into yet another winter, when wet conditions often make it challenging to complete paving projects.

The delays have pushed the $10 million contract with Bay Cities to about $11 million so far, Nutt said.

The total project cost had been in the range of $32 million, but a new estimate was not immediately available.

The city says it expects work to be completed by spring, but there appears to be much work still outstanding.

In addition to the curb and gutters on the west side that now will have to be removed, there are steels plates covering several areas, inexplicable patches of asphalt over areas of new sidewalks and numerous open trenches with exposed electric wires.

Grubin said he’s not surprised there’s been an elevation issue on the project. A civil engineer himself, he has long wondered about the sharp drop of up to 18 inches between the current roadway elevation and the new curb and gutters.

“I just knew this one was just going bad for some reason,” he said.