Borough officials have been waiting months for company to fix rough spot

                East Greenville Borough Council members voted unanimously Tuesday night to cut off ties with GoreCon Inc. following months of the company's repeated lawsuit threats over an outstanding payment for what was deemed a poorly completed project on Arlington Street. 

                The borough is withholding from the Doylestown-based contracting firm a final payment of $8,100 after engineers found a flaw in repair that's causing storm water to flow inadequately and flood a neighboring private property.

                Michael Smith, lead engineer from Cowan Associates who was responsible for supervising the Arlington Street project, went on record along with attorney Stephen Kramer, before the council during the Feb. 24 meeting, about the ongoing litigation with GoreCon over deficient attempts to reconstruct the street's barrier to prevent flooding.

                "Since the very beginning of this project, [GoreCon] has been needlessly combative with our engineers. What should've been a smooth functioning road project has now turned into a rhetorical battle between myself and GoreCon's attorney," Kramer said.

                "We need this project to be finished, otherwise if they decide they don't want to finish the project, we have to go through the entire rebidding process again which is extremely expensive and time-consuming," he added.

                Smith said the defect was made aware to CoreCon's contractors on site when it was first spotted but the team assured engineers that it was following the instructions given by the home office. After several closed-door negotiations, GoreCon agreed to fix the problem by installing a modified speed bump at the end of one driveway, causing the water to deflect back onto the private property.

                Now, according to Smith, the company blames the borough engineers for the default in the construction. 

                Borough officials said they still hold hope that the contracting agency would reconsider its role in the litigation and come back to finish the job right so that the final payment could be released. Kramer told council that he has notified the agency about signing the change order request form that would extend the contract into May of 2015.

So far, no response to the form's request has been made by GoreCon or the bond company.

                "The ideal thing would be for them to come out and fix [the driveway hump] but they haven't given us no indication that they're going to do it," Kramer said.

                In other news, James Fry, borough manager, told the council that he's putting off the application for PennDOT's "Green Light Go" grant on hold after he was advised to conduct further engineering work and acquire additional permits toward upgrading the traffic light post at intersection of Fourth and Main streets.

                According to Fry, the special PennDOT grant requires a 50 percent match and is estimated to cost about $30,000. If the borough takes the advantage of the grant, without necessary permits, Fry said the transportation department could order the borough to conduct further maintenance to the same traffic light assembly, escalating the cost of the project even more.