Earlier this week we reported that local contractor Wahlund Construction, along with Sacramento Valley company HDD Co. Inc., had completed a drilling project for the City of Eureka. Now, the president of the company that walked off the project over a contract dispute with the City has issued a statement. Mike Lachner, president of Apex Directional Drilling, again asserts that Eureka officials misrepresented the job and failed to reimburse the company for unanticipated costs.

Here’s his statement:

No one at Apex Directional Drilling ever said it would be impossible to complete the drilling and pipe work needed for Eureka’s Martin Slough interceptor project. Instead, Apex asserted the truth: The project was impossible to complete as described in our contract, and it would cost more than the city initially estimated because soil conditions were completely different than what we were told they’d be, requiring changes to the job.

Nonetheless, we were on board to complete the work –- so long as we were compensated fairly for our costs.

The company even offered to forego making any profit in order to complete the project –- likely for millions less than it appears the city ultimately paid.

We outlined the potential costs in great detail for trying to solve the problems encountered and finish the project. However, the city never agreed to pay them – or to compensate us for work already conducted beyond the scope of our initial contract.

The work conducted by Wahlund was very similar to what we’d outlined, and those proposed techniques did indeed work – plus, unlike our crews, Wahlund had the advantage of knowing the actual ground conditions, as we’d already encountered them, and the benefit of using our drill steel, which we had already drilled clear through the hill and left for whichever contractor the city hired to complete the project. Wahlund finished the work using a drill three times as big as the one the city specified for us to use on the job in our contract.

I don’t know why the city would spend more to hire Wahlund than to compensate us for work we had performed so far and for the additional work needed to finish the project. But as you can see from the city’s expenditures to hire a new contractor for this job, it did indeed cost more to complete this phase of the project. The city spent almost $4 million to bring Wahlund Construction in to do work we had already started.