As if a recent legal ruling concerning the Ohio River Trail repair project wasn’t stressful enough, the City of Marietta has just received notice it owes the Ohio Department of Transportation $99,000 on Lancaster Street work that took place in 2020.

Marietta City Council Finance Committee Chair Mike Scales called Wednesday morning and Wednesday evening finance meetings to talk to other council members about what comes next on challenges they face on those two projects.

As far as the $99,000 billing news is concerned, Scales says he, Engineer Bob Heady and Mayor Josh Schlicher definitely need to plan a chat with ODOT about it. What annoys him even more, he says, is that the ODOT work wasn’t effective at eliminating the initial problem anyway. Heady suggested at one of the finance meetings that the city could still consider asking ODOT to correct the problem, at ODOT’s cost.

The charges are apparently related to a project where Marietta installed a water line on a portion of Lancaster Street and ODOT did the stormwater catch basins and sidewalks. The ODOT portion ran between Dougas and Bartlett Streets. The project started in late October 2020.

Scales and Heady both say the stormwater is not hitting the catch basins and there’s still a flow of water and mud during rainy conditions. But when the city tried to discuss that with ODOT at the time, Scales said, ODOT informed them the project was closed as of January 2021.

Heady said his initial reading of the $99,000 charge is that it’s a combination of overruns on change orders, around $25,000, and half the cost of extensive rock excavation for the storm sewer. That shared cost was about $57,000 for ODOT. Plus, it appears the administration costs on services ODOT provided were listed at 16%, instead of the customary 10 percent.

In recent developments concerning the Ohio River Trail landslip repair, Washington County Court of Common Pleas Judge Mark Kerenyi granted a summary judgment to the company that did the original geotechnical engineering. It means the city’s 2021 lawsuit charging there was negligence and breach of contract is effectively stopped, unless the city decides to appeal within 30 days of the date the order was issued.