Missouri, Illinois Design-Build Projects

Road Contractors Head
Down a New Highway

by Don Talend

Amid a growing need for infrastructure improvements and ever-intensifying scrutiny of return on limited funding, two Midwestern states are testing new value-engineering approaches to highway construction.

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The Missouri Department of Transportation is using design-build to fast-track the three-year reconstruction of Interstate 64 through St. Louis within a $535 million spending limit. The Illinois State Toll Highway Authority is using a performance specification contract to fast-track construction of a $125 million, 1.3-mi-long bridge on an extension of Interstate 355 while addressing environmental challenges in rapidly growing Will County southwest of Chicago.

The design-build process in St. Louis is estimated to reduce actual construction costs by about 20%, says Dan Galvin, public information manager with Gateway Constructors, the design-build consortium on I-64.

In Illinois the performance specification contract for the bridge that crosses the Des Plaines River, the Sanitary & Ship Canal and the Illinois and Michigan Canal is yielding savings of about 7.5% over the next-lowest bid, says Jan Kemp, a spokesperson for the Illinois tollway.

Although design-build and performance specification contracts are relatively new to these states for highway work, there is some familiarity with them.
The I-64 project is the first design-build highway project in Missouri, but Watsonville, Calif.-based Granite Construction, part of project consortium Gateway Constructors, has completed highway projects in Arizona and Minnesota using this type of contract.

“A whole lot needed to be done and in the shortest amount of time possible, and design-build was really useful in that effort,” Galvin says.

The Illinois project is the tollway’s second use of a performance specification contract. In 2004, such a contract was used successfully on an Interstate 894 improvement project south of Chicago.

Minimizing Inconvenience in Missouri

Gateway Constructors will reconstruct all pavement, bridges and interchanges along a 10-mi stretch of I-64 between Spoede Road in St. Louis County and Kingshighway Boulevard in the city of St. Louis by 2009. The project will be completed by 2010.

To keep Missouri’s largest-ever highway project on schedule and maximize the work the budget allows, the team includes Granite, Watsonville, Calif.; Fred Weber Inc., Creve Coeur, Mo.; Millstone Bangert, St. Charles, Mo.; Parsons Transportation Group, Pasadena, Calif.; and URS Corp., San Francisco. Half of I-64 will be closed during each of the next two years.

The western half from Interstate 170 to Interstate 270 will be closed in 2008 and the eastern half from I-170 to another major north-south artery, Kingshighway, will be closed in 2009.

A major improvement will be an interchange between I-64 and I-170, which is being constructed this year.

“If we built only an interchange that stopped right there, it would do so much to improve traffic flow in this area,” Galvin says. “That’s how important this interchange is to this whole area.”

Another proposal would have kept the highway open to traffic in one direction in alternating years, but it would have taken twice as long to complete and delivered only about half of the items on MoDOT’s project “wish list” within the budget compared with the winning proposal delivering nearly everything, says Linda Wilson, I-64 community relations manager for MoDOT.

Wilson adds that design-build is allowing Gateway Constructors much flexibility in overcoming design and construction challenges as they emerge—and staying within the $420 million budget for actual construction. The contractors must adhere to national American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials standards, but they can also use other states’ designs for structures such as bridges and walls if they are better and more cost-effective.

Galvin says design-build is keeping the project moving as quickly as possible.

“You don’t have situations where we have to have a meeting to make this change and start making phone calls and find out when so and so can get here,” he says. “You walk down the hall and say, Can you meet me in the conference room in five minutes?’ It really helps with efficiencies, and it also helps to bring costs down.”

Special legislation passed in 2002 allows this project, the Safe and Sound statewide bridge replacement program and the Interstate 29/Interstate 35 reconstruction in Kansas City to use design-build. MoDOT is overseen by the Missouri State Highways and Transportation Commission and operates according to specific legislative mandates that currently do not allow design-build. The hope is that if these projects are successful, the Missouri General Assembly will give MoDOT the authority for more widespread design-build use.

Bridging Economics, Environment in Illinois

The I-355 extension has been planned since 1960 and is designed to relieve congestion on several nearby north-south arterials in one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation.

The project was to begin in 1995 when environmental groups challenged an environmental impact study. About one-third of the bridge is located on federally protected wetlands and the project was deemed adverse to two endangered species: the Heinz emerald dragonfly and the Blanding’s turtle.

After the EIS was revised in 2002, performance specifications dictating parameters such as maximum bridge height—out of the dragonfly’s flight path—and bridge footprint were established to allow bids on tollway-approved steel or concrete segmental box designs, or using other designs that fit the performance specifications.

Existing trails were used for haul roads to avoid impacting turtles and construction workers were told to notify state scientists when turtles were observed so they could be relocated outside the construction zone.

Construction material costs had a large bearing on the use of performance specification contracting, adds Jeff Dailey, chief engineer for the tollway.

“We wanted to get the project out to bid as fast as possible,” he says. “Steel prices are up and down, gas prices are up and down, concrete is up and down—so to design a bridge and then pick a certain material type, you can do that, but you’re not taking advantage of the best value in the market at the time, nor are you taking advantage of the contractors’ different capabilities.”

The low bidder was Chicago-based Walsh Construction Co., which used its own design—a post-tensioned spliced bulb tee beam design—that Walsh has used in other states. The tensile strengths that the design achieves allow the use of spans that are from 114 to 271 ft long. The pier caps are also post-tensioned, which allows the piers to meet an aesthetic performance requirement of only four columns.

The beam segments, of which there are six in each direction and which vary in length from 90 to 171 ft, are supported by temporary shoring towers between spans prior to completion.

The bridge deck units range from 656 to 1,529 ft and are joined by modular expansion joint assembly, with a few inches of space to allow for expansion and contraction. There is also a foot of space between each three-lane traffic direction to provide for swaying. The longest unit is 1,529 ft long and is equipped with blockouts for post-tensioning from the middle to the end of the unit.

An aggressive 22-month schedule that ends this October necessitates construction from either end. The spans are longer in the middle due to the way the piers were spaced for minimal impact on the wetlands. Starting at both ends simultaneously allowed the contractor to get its feet wet with the erection process on less difficult segments.

The construction process is coordinated with 60-mi delivery of the long beams from Prestress Engineering Corp.’s Blackstone, Ill., precast plant, truck staging and the teardown and redeployment of the shoring towers on temporary foundations, which can take a week.

“There has been a lot of planning done by the tollway and the contractor in terms of how the work areas are going to be defined,” says Tom Valaitis, construction division director with Woodridge, Ill.-based V3 Cos., the construction designer and manager on the project. “The work areas are limited by size in that we have a maximum impact that we can have on the wetlands in the valley. The work zones are very clearly defined in the wetland areas.”

The construction team is leaving intact many of the wetland fingers, and it even trucked out the muck where the construction road was constructed. After being stored, the muck will be returned to the site for regeneration.

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