The 200,000-square-foot, five-story, 350-room hotel, with 25 distinguished visitor suites, was supposed to open up across from the Davis Conference Center on MacDill Air Force Base last month.
But the best-laid hotels of airmen gang agley sometimes.
And now the hotel project, which began with the bid award in September 2012 and is slated to cost nearly $46 million, probably won’t be open until the end of the year at the earliest, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing the project.
Then again, no one really knows for sure, says corps spokesman Lance Davis (no relation to Benjamin Oliver Davis Jr., commander of the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II and the first black general officer in the history of the Air Force, for whom the Davis Conference Center is named).
The only thing that is certain is that the delays have a price, costing nearly $700,000, Davis says. The corps is now trying to figure out who is on the hook for the bulk of that cost overrun — the Blair-Remy Corp. of Oklahoma City, which designed the hotel, or the government, and by that I mean you and I via tax dollars.
(To put things in perspective, regardless of who pays, the cost overrun equals about 1.5 percent of the project cost, well under figures cited by several studies compiled by the military. One, by the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, found that the median overrun percentage for a project valued at more than $1 million was 3.24 percent. A 2006 Air Force study said the flying branch typically plans for about a 5 percent overrun figure and that the contingency is usually exceeded.)
The hotel is designed for those who travel to MacDill, home to U.S. Central Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, Special Operations Command Central, the 6th Air Mobility Wing, the 927th Air Refueling Wing, the Joint Communications Support Element and dozens of other base tenants and mission partners.
There are several other temporary housing facilities on the base, says Terry Montrose, a spokesman for the 6th Air Mobility Wing, which is the base host unit.
The new hotel project went off the rails even before the first shovel of dirt was turned, says Davis.
The construction award, to Carothers Construction, was part of a much larger contract, known as an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity, that was protested by two companies. One was Archer Western Contractors, a Chicago-based company with an office in Tampa. The other was Clark Construction LLC, of Bethesda, Maryland, also with an office in Tampa.
The protest set the project back three months, says Davis.
After that, there was the discovery of what Davis calls “design omissions and errors” that needed to be resolved.
Apparently, the design that Blair-Remy provided wasn’t good enough, so they had to reconfigure their plans, says Davis.
That meant going back to the drawing board, and adding 20 more concrete foundation piles “to ensure adequate structural support,” says Davis. Also, there was a need for 40 tons of additional support steel for the fifth floor curtain wall system “to provide required wind resistance.”
A curtain wall is a non-structural wall often made out of glass, translucent plastic or other materials that keeps the elements out and people in. Thus wind resistance is a good thing when you are pretty much right on the water in Florida.
All told, the design issues added another 168 days to the project, says Davis. Unforeseen site and weather conditions added another 18 days of delay, says Davis.
The bulk of the cost overrun — $634,200 — was for the design changes, says Davis. Another $42,525 in overruns is due to the unforeseen site conditions, he says.
So who pays?
That remains to be seen, says Davis.
“The government is evaluating responsibility for these additional costs,” he says. “It could be the government or the contractor.”
Davis does not know how long it will take to figure out who pays.
Officials from Blair-Remy, which has a very cool address of 7 S. Mickey Mantel Way — the number and name of the most famous Oklahoma-born shortstop turned center fielder in history — did not respond to a request for comment.
Another mystery is when the hotel will actually open.
The hotel was originally supposed to be completed in January and open in March after a typical 90-day buffer period.
In an initial conversation, Davis said that instead, it was looking like the hotel would open around the end of the year. But on further review, he says that no one really knows right now.
“There’s no firm date,” says Davis.
So all you visiting admirals and generals and others transiting through or visiting MacDill, hold off on those reservations for now.
❖ ❖ ❖
A few weeks back I wrote about a request by the Saudis for aerial refueling services in their coalition campaign against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. At the time, the Pentagon said that while the Saudis had asked permission for the gas, they hadn’t actually requested it.
Well that changed since I last broached the subject, and, as expected, some folks from Tampa were involved in the action, which became so controversial because of civilian causalities that the Saudis temporarily halted the campaign, according to the New York Times, only to resume it a short while later, according to several published accounts.
MacDill, which has 16 KC-135 tankers shared between the 6th and the 927th, has crews in Qatar flying missions all around the region, including Yemen, according to Capt. Sarah Babcock, a spokeswoman with the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing.
The MacDill crews, including one from the 927th that recently returned, become part of the 340th Expeditionary Air Refueling Squadron (EARS) once in the Centcom region, says Babcock in an email to me last week. The 340th EARS “is a total force squadron made up of active-duty, Guard, and Reserve Airmen and aircraft from 27 squadrons from 19 Air refueling Wings and one Refueling Group in 14 stateside locations and two overseas locations across the Air Force,” says Babcock. “The 340th EARS total force team includes members deployed from MacDill” who have supported the Yemen mission.
So in case you are wondering about a reason to care about Yemen, I once again urge you to think about this.
There is a humanitarian crisis in the country of 24 million located on the southwest corner of the Arabian peninsula, where multi-layered warfare — involving groups like al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and the Iranian-backed Houthis — is exacerbating the already existing misery of a nation that cannot feed itself. And your neighbors are in harm’s way fueling up the Saudi coalition.
❖ ❖ ❖
The Pentagon announced no new deaths in the ongoing operations in the Centcom region last week.
There have been four U.S. troop deaths in support of Operation Inherent Resolve and one in support of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.