Prison delay: Pa. appeals to builders after $21M manager doesn't deliver $400M opening date

High-level Pennsylvania officials have been meeting directly with builders of the delayed $400 million State Correctional Institution Phoenix in Skippack in an attempt to set a completion date for the state's largest prison, which was supposed to be ready back in 2015.

Two top aides to Gov. Wolf -- Corrections Secretary John Wetzel, who agreed to the Phoenix project when he worked for Gov. Tom Corbett, and General Services Secretary Curt Topper, who oversees state construction -- met Jan. 9 with leaders of Walsh Heery Joint Venture, the combine of Chicago and Atlanta firms building Phoenix, "to begin to discuss the issues we're facing," Topper spokesman Troy Thompson told me last week.

That followed an exchange of grim letters last fall between Walsh Heery senior project manager Ed Kerber and Mark D. Dickinson, vice president of Hill International, the Philadelphia firm the state hired to represent it at Phoenix.

The letters, obtained under the state Right to Know law, showed a wide gap between the state's rep and the builders on whether the prison was close to being ready and how many hundred construction features still needed approvals.

A new completion date "has not been reached," Thompson told me Thursday. "Discussions are continuing" between the state and the contractors, who Pennsylvania contends owe more than $10 million for delays.

When the state hired Hill in 2012, the firm said it expected to collect $9.8 million for three years' work at Phoenix. Hill has by now been paid more than $20 million, the state says.

Delay on the complex prison has not kept Hill from winning area deals. The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission last month gave Hill an $8 million contract to monitor toll-road work in Montgomery and Bucks Counties into 2026.

Since work on Phoenix started, Pennsylvania's prison population has dropped below 50,000, and Wolf has said he will close prisons in Western Pennsylvania.

Wetzel has said Phoenix would replace the neighboring Graterford prison. He said he hoped Phoenix would cost about $70 per inmate each day, less than the $100 cost at Graterford.

Phoenix faced earlier delays. Under Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, the state sought bids from contractors willing to work with construction trades unions in a joint project labor agreement. Republican Corbett had the project rebid to seek a design-build general contractor without a PLA.

Under Wolf, a Democrat, the state has encouraged PLAs, citing Phoenix as an example of how delays can pile up when contractors and labor aren't bound by a close work-rules and dispute-resolution arrangement.

But Frank Cook, a New Jersey attorney representing a nonunion general contractor who has been trying to get a PLA dropped from the planned new I-95 Scudder Falls Bridge over the Delaware, said PLAs tend to boost costs by reducing the number of builders willing to bid.

Only one firm bid to build the I-95 bridge, at a price more than 20 percent above the project target, as I reported Jan. 22. The Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission is scheduled to review that bid at its meeting Monday.