San Jacinto Plaza Contractor To Be Fined One Thousand Dollars a Day for Delays

November, March, mid-May - when the heck is San Jacinto Plaza going to be finished? Three completion date deadlines have come and gone, and San Jacinto still looks like a bomb hit it. The contractor and the City have stopped giving completion dates, but the City has decided to light a bit of a fire under Basic IDIQ.

They will have to pay a one thousand dollar a day fine retroactive to May 4th until the project is finished.
The City’s legal team is also working with the contractor's attorneys to get San Jacinto finished. That in and of itself is a bad omen. When everyone lawyers up, that means a lot of negotiating and even more foot dragging.

So why is this taking so long? No one, not the City nor Basic IDIQ, has much to say about that, but maybe the almost two dozen change orders on the San Jacinto Plaza construction could have something to do with that.

For now, the taxpayers of El Paso still don't have a completion date, and Council has agreed to get weekly updates on the project. Weekly updates. As in, many more weeks of construction.

Hopefully, future generations will be able to enjoy the newly renovated San Jacinto park, because it's beginning to look a lot like most of us will be too old to by the time the project is completed.