Travis County Commssioners Court
March 11, 2003
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Item 23
[Change in captioners]
>> oh, much more than that.
>> well, or three million?
>> close to four. Cler cler.
>> and one of the things that we were going to look into,
given that we felt like that part of at least our problems on our landfill
out there might be the flea market, have we found out anything about that?
Have we contacted the landlord and let him broach that subject with the flea
market?
>> well, that's actually something that I think -- we'd be
happy to call him and let him know that that's the approach that we're taking,
but I don't think that we can really start pointing fingers or cutting deals
until we get the survey information that tells us exactly, hey, you know,
we've got a lot of depression problems, subsidence problems on your side of
the fence. These are going to take x amount of resources to take care of.
And we could use a little assistance on your side. That's one example. Although
I don't have a problem at all with making the first phone call and saying,
you know, these are the steps that we're taking. This is the situation where
ian with tceq and -- just he did up. We're going to pull the agreement --
the first thing we need to do, of course, is pull the agreement and get that
to legal counsel and begin to have a firm idea of should things get rough
where we stand.
>> we have a contract with these guys. How are we indemnified
for anything, john? If something doesn't work, would the plan that they give
us to come in and to fix this problem and -- is there x amount of days that
we have that -- if we come back with another issue, that we have to go back
to them and say we've got another issue, start the meter again? How is that
done?
>> you're talking about the relationship with the contractor
or with --
>> with the contractor.
>> I suppose there's just contract indemnification clauses
there.
>> yeah. I think if they do work for us and there's what
you might characterize as a professional error or omission, then yeah, the
standard contract language requires them to indemnify us, hold us harmless.
They basically have to pay for that. If they are exercising their best professional
judgment and it's not a mistake or error on their part, but just -- give their
best professional judgment and it turned out not to work, then they would
not have to indemnify us for something like that.
>> and I wasn't -- and I guess really my final question on
this thing is as it states here, with this modification, the total contract
price takes us over the original contract, you know, a sizeable amount.
>> uh-huh.
>> can you tell me why?
>> yeah. This speaks to just the challenge of this problem.
I mean, we've had, I guess, -- the iteration of several different best estimates
of what the solution would be. And in this case, as I have explained to y'all
primarily in executive session, I guess, that you have nature involved here
and you also have some technology that's being early well experimented with
here because there's not a good example to go to to say that this will definitely
do it forever and we're done. As we found out even with our meeting with tceq,
in their opinion we had the wettest landfill that they're aware of in the
state, closed landfill. So we just have unique challenges here that have required
us to respond. And that's why when I was asked the question, what do you think
could keep us in a more proactive stance, I hate it say it, but my answer
had to be corporate financial flexibility because we've got to be able to
get ahead of the problem when we see it coming instead of coming around and
answering to it after the fact. I wish I could give you better answers. This
site has been the bane of some of our careers. It just has been.
>> so we thought that the whole leachate collection system
was going to work and that was going to be sufficient, and then it turns out
that it wasn't. And then in terms of trying to get a solution tied tide in
with the city of Austin of trying to tie into their wastewater system, we
were hoping it would work a certain way in terms of tying into the system
and it turns out we had to do a whole bunch of stuff before we would be allowed
to get our stuff into there. So it's not for lack of, I think, good effort
or due diligence on this part, it's just that we had to keep responding to
rapidly changing conditions and, of course, the requirements of the city in
terms of what it would take to tie into their system, they were able to dictate
that, and I think they had good reason to say what they did. And we did that
too.
>> and luckily we -- I think it has worked until environmental
conditions that we had no control over basically overcame that system. And
we've got it right now to try to catch up, but when you've got a big mass
of water, it just takes time from the system that you've got in place to catch
up and do that.
>> lots of -- [ inaudible ]
>> as we mentioned, we will be improving that system with
some of the construction that will result from the design that's before you
today.
>> [ inaudible ] so that the leachate seepage, that this
should take care of that problem with the design of the french drains and
that too. I think it's something that we need to do. And I have no problem
with this. I would like to go to approval of item 23.
>> second.
>> any more discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous
vote.
>> thanks.
>> thank you.
Last Modified: Wednesday, April 2, 2003 10:25 AM