Advisers question American Tobacco Trail expenses

A member of a key advisory board says Durham officials need to look harder at why the bids for an extension of the American Tobacco Trail came in about 38 percent higher than expected.

The $2.1 million overrun “indicates the possibility of a serious error in judgment” by the engineers who designed the project and the city staffers who worked with them, said Toby Berla, a member of the Durham Open Space and Trails Commission.

Berla told fellow commission members last week that an architect and engineer he’d spoken to about the project were “not at all surprised” that the trail extension and its associated bridge over Interstate 40 had come in as high as they did.

“I don’t mean to start pointing fingers in the middle of a crisis, but I also don’t think we can just look the other way and pretend that nothing went wrong,” Berla said in an email to his colleague. “A $2 million underestimate on a project of this scope is huge, and demands a clear explanation of what went wrong.”

Berla’s comments came as he and other members of the trails commission — one of two advisory panels involved in the matter — began weighing their response to the city’s plan for covering the overrun.

Administrators intend to raise additional monies by draining construction reserves for four sidewalk-and-bicycle-lane projects in other parts of the city.

All told, they’re looking to push the trail’s construction budget up to $9.6 million, enough to cover the overrun plus a generous contingency. The trail is a 22-mile path for cyclists and pedestrians from just south of the West Point on the Eno city park in Durham to the Jordan Lake game lands in Wake County.

The prospect of taking construction money away from the sidewalk projects troubled some commission members, among them the panel’s new chairman, Duke University professor Will Wilson.

“The thing is, it’s robbing Peter to pay Paul,” said Wilson, who is among a slate of candidates vying for an appointment to a vacant County Commissioners seat. “We just don’t know what to think right now.”

Wilson’s emails to other commission members indicated he was especially bothered because one of the sidewalk projects targets a stretch of Hillandale Road he considers a danger to bicyclists.

But he and Berla both indicated that the trails commission could come down in favor of keeping the Tobacco Trail on track, despite members’ qualms.

Completion of the American Tobacco Trail has been a high priority for the commission and other pedestrian-and-bike advocates for years.

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