Tulsa Street, Storm Water, and Sewer Project Delays

As a member of Tulsa's Sales Tax Overview Committee (STOC), I attend regular meetings with the project heads and staff members at Public Works to go over the various street, storm water, and sewer projects that are funded with sales tax or bond monies.

During a recent meeting, I kept hearing something very similar to "Project number 054171 - Because of utility conflicts we are going to push the advertise date back, ONG has a gas line that needs to be moved."  A utility conflict arises when a utility company needs to move one of their lines but can not do it in time to meet the project dead line.  This can be either because the utility company does not have the man power to perform their task on our schedule, or because a utility line turned out to be an unexpected and unplanned for surprise.  In this case construction had not even started, nor the contract awarded.  We knew about the line but OG&E would not be able to relocate it when we needed them to...thus project delay.

At the end of the meeting having heard something similar to the above statement at least three times, I asked, "So, is that three projects that are delayed because of ONG "  The answer was quite a shock to me; No about 60 projects are delayed because of  ONG utility conflicts. In ten of those projects the contract has already been awarded and/or construction has already started.  For those ten it was thought that OG&E would be able to get to the relocates in time...unfortunately...not.

There are two major forces at play that are causing this to happen.
1.  ONG only has three crews in Tulsa that can perform this work.  They used to have four crews, but due to cutbacks it is now three.

2.   There have been a flood of 2008 projects that require total street re-construction.  Were some of these projects just standard milling of the road bed and an overlay of asphalt, there would be no need to involve ONG . However, a lot of these projects call for a level of  work that will either run into a gas line, or will disturb the ground enough that the line would be damaged.  Some of these streets sit on top of 50-year-old lines that are not deep enough.  There is a potential that the street work could cause damage to those lines resulting in a leak that would the require the brand new street to be ripped up in order to repair it.

Unfortunately, this means that until ONG can get to some of these projects, they will sit on the shelf waiting to be started.

UPDATE
A previous version stated that that OG&E was the company involved.  I was mistaken. It was ONG.  I didn't read my notes correctly.  Sorry for the confusion.