By John Pacenti
Replacing a portion of Ocean Ridge’s water main running down State Road A1A turned out to be a delicate operation as the 70-year-old pipe proved especially brittle, causing numerous unexpected breaks.
This led to a hopscotch pattern of asphalt patches. Now the Florida Department of Transportation wants the town to repave the affected parts of A1A at a cost of up to $325,000.
“Because there were so many breaks and so many patches, they’re asking us to go above and beyond what our engineering plan showed,” Town Engineer Lisa Tropepe said at the Town Commission’s Dec. 9 meeting.
Initially, Mayor Geoff Pugh was reluctant. “Why would we do that?” he said. “That’s a state road.”
Though FDOT will be repaving A1A in southern Delray Beach, there are no plans to continue northward, commissioners were told by contractor Foster Marine.
Tropepe and Foster Marine said FDOT has made unexpected demands after greenlighting the initial plans. “They approved it and they sat over here at the pre-construction meeting and didn’t say a word,” Tropepe said.
Commissioners authorized the money needed for the additional road work.
Pugh told Tropepe and Foster Marine he felt the repaving costs were a surprise. “We’re getting basically, you know, slapped in the back of the head,” he said.
Commissioners were told the delay was getting information from FDOT on whether the state would resurface the road in the near future. They also approved a $45,000 emergency change order to shut off the old pipe for the last remaining residents using it. And there was also $101,000 approved for cost overruns due to field directives.
In all, the commission approved up to $471,000 in new spending on Dec. 9.
The cost coming into the meeting for that A1A leg of the water pipe replacement project was $2.58 million.
Replacing the A1A pipe from Island Drive to Inlet Cay Drive is just the first step. Tropepe provided a chart for the work for the rest of the town — broken up into seven phases — estimating the cost would be $38.8 million over eight years.
Not all is bad news, Tropepe said. The town has 3,600 linear feet of new pipe and 95% of the impacted residents are hooked up to the new main.
“We’re just so happy to get that pipe out of commission. And we need to do everything we can ... to get that type of pipe wherever it is in town, we need to get it out of here,” she said.
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