AT&T poles block progress on Florence Road.

Murfreesboro’s top engineer says he’s frustrated; frustrated because the city has to take it on the chin for incessant delays in local road construction projects when he has no control over the primary reason

In virtually all cases, he said recently, third party utility contractors simply will not move their infrastructure (utility poles and wiring) in a timely manner and that creates headaches for everyone, the road builders and engineers certainly, but more importantly, the driving public.

Murfreesboro City Engineer Chris Griffith said in a press release he’s at least as frustrated as those who call city hall with complaints about reconstruction projects that should have been completed three, six, even nine months ago.

Middle Tennessee Boulevard (MTB) is a good example of a project that could have been finished months ago if utilities had been relocated on time, he said.

And the contractors he has virtually no control over?

Most of the time they include contractors like AT&T (formerly BellSouth), Atmos Energy, Inc., Murfreesboro Electric Department (MED), Middle Tennessee Electric Membership Corporation (MTEMC), Murfreesboro Water and Sewer Department (MWSD) and Comcast, Inc., just to name six.

“Atmos and MED are about the most proactive,” Griffith said. “Comcast’s fiber is usually moved quickly. Even though Comcast is among the last ones in, they can knock out a job in about a week. MTEMC is another one. Water and sewer is included with our contract.”

Griffith said that BellSouth, the regional baby Bell recently acquired by AT&T,
was itself already very slow about moving relocation projects along because designs had
to approved by people in corporate headquarters, which might have been in a neighboring
state.
Now that AT&T has moved much of its management to San Antonio, Texas, the problem promises only to get worse, headaches the city’s engineering department, the construction companies chosen to do the reconstruction and the driving public have no choice but to endure.

“It’s just a frustrating situation,” Griffith said. “MTB would have been completed six months ago had we had better support from the utilities. People need to know it is frustrating for us too. I always apologize for construction delays because they are nasty and inconvenient for people. Part of our job is to limit that inconvenience as much as possible.”

On the other hand, he said, when the utilities perform as they should, road projects generally run smoothly and are completed in less than the projected time.

“Take Old Lascassas Pike (a 2006 project) for instance,” he said. “That project went perfectly far as utilities are concerned. They came in and relocated their pole lines from one end to the other and we completed that project four to five months early.

“The point is,” he continued, “the third-party contractors performed like they should. We (construction companies and others) stayed on one side of the road while they worked on the other side ... we were able to knock it out in no time at all.”

Also in comparison, because there are no relocations to contend with, road projects that strike out across virgin land can be completed on time.

“A half-mile road through a green field can be completed in 60 to 90 days,” he said.

And there are other examples of utility relocation projects that have bogged down the reconstruction process.

“The worst example now,” Griffith said, “is out at the Florence Road/Old Nashville Highway (widening) project. The city is making safety improvements out there at the intersection. We’ve gone as far as we can go but we’re on hold there and nine months behind schedule ... it’s all strictly because of the utilities, primarily AT&T (formerly BellSouth).

“Most of our road projects, and I’m being conservative, could be completed in 60 to 70 percent of the projected time if the utilities would just come in and do their relocations on time,” Griffith continued.

But timely projects are exceptions and not the rule, he said. Despite contacting everyone in the company they can think of, AT&T’s infrastructure remains unfinished adjacent to the Florence Road/Old Nashville Highway project near the city’s new public works facility.

“We’ve contacted everybody we know,” Griffith said. “Even Mr. Haley (City Manager Roger Haley) contacted the top person at what was formerly Bellsouth. They finally started relocating their line recently after 15 months of delays.”

Another example of how third-party contractors like AT&T can delay a project is the Greenland Drive improvements, Griffith said.

“I was told eight weeks ago that they would be off the poles in two months,” Griffith said. “The first month came and went without much progress, during the next monthly meeting they said they were finally ready to go to the site but it was another four weeks in (the design phase). That put us another month behind.”

Named Murfreesboro City Engineer in early June of 2002, Chris Griffith has seen far more than his share of major road construction projects in fast-growing Murfreesboro. Among his many priorities for tweaking the process has been to come up with a way to develop road reconstructions that is fair to the contractors.

“We got together and said we’ve got to come up with system to give the utilities a list of projects we’re planning over next two or three years and when we think they will be under way,” he said. “(With a system in place now) we do the survey work for them (utilities), give them the right-of-way information including the property lines and all they have to do is overlay their designs.

“I know the public gets frustrated sometimes when road projects look like they are dragging on and on,” Griffith said. “It frustrates us as well but there is often very little we can do about it.”

Third party contractor contacts include Tony Cook and Jeff Grissom at 224-4762 for Comcast, John Castleman at 848-2078 or Joe Spann at 714-9815 for AT&T, Jerry Burke at 890-6749 for Atmos Energy, Inc. and Brandon Whitt at 893-7570 for Middle Tennessee Electric Membership Corporation (MTEMC).