Board suspends pay for police station engineers

SWAMPSCOTT – The Swampscott Police Station Building Committee will be temporarily suspending the pay of GZA GeoEnvironmental Technologies, Inc., after the committee found that GZA employees were requesting pay for time spent traveling to the building site.The committee members approved a motion at Wednesday night?s meeting at Town Hall to delay paying the geotechnical engineering company what it was requesting until the contract can be checked to see if travel time was included as an expense.?If there was contract language they would have written it in the first or second paragraph verbatim,” said committee member Phil Merkle.Sean Burke of PMA Consultants, who is handling the project?s budget, reported that some employees were recording up to an hour and a half every day for travel time. “In my experience, if you get paid for travel, you put it in the contract,” said Burke at the meeting. “If it?s not there, it may be an issue.”Project Architect Greg Carell of Carell Group, Inc., said the suspension is just to see if “what they are billing is what they are entitled to.”Burke said nothing in the contract other than the “questionable travel time” was being disputed, but committee members also questioned why GZA failed to detect the low level of contaminated soil that was found at the building site by another company later in the building process.Burke said GZA?s initial testing found no contaminants at the site. “We had so much contamination and it wasn?t detected at first,” he said.Committee Chair Patrick Jones agreed. “It just seems odd that we had testing done in the same areas and we had nothing come back from GZA.”Carell said the contaminants may just be incinerated material left over from the last building on the site. “It was the presence of a chemical that one would expect to find at an urban fill site, which is what we?ve got,” he said.Burke reassured the committee that the levels were not alarming. “This is the lowest amount of contamination you can have. It?s not dangerous.”Though the contaminates aren?t harmful, the committee must pay to haul away and properly dispose of the material that was scattered around the site which, Burke reported, would cost over $40,000 for the 2,000 tons needing removal.Even with the concerns over GZA?s contract and issue of the contaminated soil, Jones said before the adjournment of the meeting, “In conclusion, we are on budget and on schedule.”Kait Taylor can be reached at [email protected].