By Brenda Flanagan
Correspondent
We’re riding on one of New Jersey’s priciest roads — a 12.5-mile stretch of Route 35, running from Bay Head to Seaside Heights. Cost: an estimated $27 million per mile.
New Jersey’s DOT confirms rebuilding these dozen miles devastated by Superstorm Sandy will cost $341 million. That’s $76 million over budget and a year over deadline.
“And it’s incredible, the waste of manpower, the waste of machinery, the waste of time getting this highway done,” said Steve Estelle.
Estelle lives here and watched this construction project from start to just about finish.
“I’ve been in construction all my life. So it’s just aggravating to see some of the methods used, because they’re really good. I mean Harms is probably one of the best contractors out there for major jobs. But finishing up, and all the wasted manpower and coming back,” he said.
New Jersey taxpayers will pick up about a third of the project’s overall cost. Overruns stem in part from delays: $4.7 million, for example, when New Jersey stopped all construction over the summer of 2014 and 2015 to ease shore traffic. Another $18 million when contractors sat idle, while utilities laid miles of natural gas pipeline.
Contractors had no comment, but Sen. Ray Lesniak did.
“Paying $18 million to a contractor not to do work? That’s feather-bedding of its worst kind. Is this just incompetence? Mistaken judgement? Was it unavoidable?” he asked.
Lesniak today called on New Jersey’s congressional delegation to investigate the Route 35 project.
“What we have here is just an incredible waste of taxpayer dollars. We have to get down to the bottom of it. The state DOT is stonewalling information about it,” Lesniak said.
“Much of Route 35 is several lanes — so we actually reconstructed 43 lane miles of highway — and that doesn’t include the shoulders, the ramps. It doesn’t include the interchange at Route 37 which is the Mathis bridge, so that’s all work that we did,” said Steve Schiapiro.
New Jersey DOT’s Schiapiro explained that grants will cover most of New Jersey’s expenses. He says Sandy ripped up 35 and rebuilding it to withstand future storms included massive infrastructure work on water, sewer, gas and drainage pumps and pipes. Sometimes, contractors had to wait.
“New Jersey Natural Gas — the extent of the damage to their system, to their gas lines — was much worse than anticipated, they had to install 13 miles of new gas line and that work had to be done before we could work on the road,” Schiapiro said.
The whole project’s supposed to be completed by the middle of this month, but a full accounting of all of the cost overruns could take a good deal longer to accomplish.