Tampa Bay Water Reaches Settlement with Desalination Plant Contractor
Tampa Bay Water's board of directors approved a settlement agreement Feb. 9 with the engineer-construction contractor for its troubled 25-million-gal-per-day desalination plant. The agreement was brokered by a bankruptcy court mediator (ENR 1/19, p. 16). Under terms of the deal, the utility will pay Covanta Tampa Construction $4.4 million from $7.9 million held in construction retainage on the $110-million project. The contractor will drop all claims and abandon attempts to stay on board as a 30-year operations and maintenance contractor.
Problems arose last spring when the utility flunked the contractor on a performance evaluation test. Now Tampa Bay Water will open discussions with three shortlisted interim O&M contractors with experience in reverse osmosis desalination plants. American Water Works Co. Inc./Pridesa are the respective American- and Spanish-owned subsidiaries of RWE AG of Essen, Germany. USFilter is a U.S. division of Veolia Environnement S.A. in Paris. Two American-owned partners compose the third team: Ionics Inc., Watertown, Mass., and MWH, Pasadena, Calif.