OUR VIEW: Sarasota's city leaders should not dig up old dirt on lift station

Of all the words said and written, on the record and off, in the murky saga of Sarasota's Lift Station 87, perhaps the most insightful came this week from Robert Fournier, the city's venerable attorney: "There’s no one single cause that I think anyone is going to be able to point to as the reason that expenses, both on the litigation side and the construction side, turned out to be significantly more than originally anticipated."

And yet the commission has voted unanimously to wade back into the odoriferous swirl of circumstances and missteps that facilitated the dumping of millions in taxpayer dollars down a deep hole – along an elaborate network of pipes that wound up leading nowhere.

It's reasonable to assume that such an inquiry will take us to the very same place. After all, this isn't rocket science; it's plumbing. 

The question of why the costs of overhauling the lift station quadrupled over 15 years – from $12.5 million nobody wanted to spend to an estimated $52 million – is also reasonable. But a quest to derive "lessons learned" or "best practices" from this particular protracted boondoggle, and apply them to future decisions about infrastructure, amounts to a misguided effort to make lemonade using wildly inappropriate ingredients.

A beleaguered sewage transfer plant near Hudson Bayou was considered a noxious neighbor even before it scandalized the city by releasing 570,000 gallons of sewage into that lovely waterway in February 2005. The spill, attributed to failure of a 20-year-old electrical switch, sparked an immediate overhaul of the city's policies for response to such disasters.

But then the plot thickened: City leaders learned that an identical leak a year earlier had gone unreported. They wanted answers, and maybe heads on platters. "I am not suggesting a witch hunt," Commissioner Lou Ann Palmer said. "I am simply trying to get the facts."

Sound familiar?

Next came more than three years of predictable wrangling about whose backyard would be the best site for a replacement. In 2011 it was announced that work would begin on Mound Street, and construction would take 18 months. The cost: $12.5 million, up from the $7-10 million estimate floated before affected residents had their say. 

By 2012, the city disclosed a "microtunneling" problem that would alter the timeline. An investigation into the project disclosed "flawed pipes, inadequate testing by an inexperienced engineer and questionable contract deals."  Contractors who had bid on the job told the Herald-Tribune they were glad they weren't chosen. And in this way, a plumbing problem became a court case.

In 2013, the city hired a new engineering firm, adding another $1.1 million to the estimate and predicting completion in 2015. By the following year, unworkable notions about building the facility underground were scrapped, which meant the station needed to look pretty enough to appease its new neighbors – perhaps disguised as an "Old Spanish Mission." The price had more than doubled. A year later, the new completion date was 2020, and the price tag was $42 million.

Litigation with former contractors has only compounded this expense. In 2017 Fournier downplayed hopes for a favorable settlement, telling commissioners that it was a complex case and a decisive victory in court would be "a little more difficult than what it might sound at first." This was prescient; in 2018 one jury actually found the city at fault.

Now we almost have a handsome new lift station. And all those engineers with good ideas that turned out to be truly bad ideas have drifted away. Maybe it's best to let them go.

Just as surely as a certain raw material always flows downhill, we anticipate that any fresh inquiry into Lift Station 87's labyrinthine history will only reveal a circle of ghostly fingers, all pointing at one another. 

The Herald-Tribune Editorial Board