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Metro Messy

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Metro is claiming fraud, negligence, breach of contract and civil conspiracy, among other charges. It maintains it lost a year's worth of revenues and lost $1.7 million for work that was never done. The CCC is countersuing for $17 million. Their liability does not exceed $8 million.

"Larry took over and said that any plans Tom Irwin had made were wrong, wrong, wrong," says a former commissioner. "Larry had to repackage the contract and re-bid it, and we allowed him to do that. And he was the person who suggested to us that an $8 million cap was perfectly adequate for any kind of overrun. So anything that happened during this Cross County fiasco is nobody's blame but his."

The former commissioner points out Metro's blame for most of the overruns on the CCC's "incomplete" designs. "Why did Metro pay for the designs? Where's our responsibility here? Didn't anybody at Metro look at them?"

Seconds former commissioner Ron Jedda: "If [Salci] had a weakness, in retrospect, maybe he would have come to the board when his first-90-days-on-the-job report of the agency was due and said, 'Hey, folks, I've reviewed this [Cross County] thing, and we've got some serious problems here.'"

"Well," Salci says, clearing his throat when asked why someone at Metro didn't notice the designs' incompleteness. "That's a good question. I can only say that had I been here two years earlier, the contract would have been structured a lot differently."

One thing Salci would have included is an oversight consultant. Asked why he did not hire one when he restructured the contract in late 2002, he says, "I could have. And we did that later [after Metro fired the CCC]."

Transit consultants contend Metro's problems aren't unique. "I've seen similar situations many, many other times," says Tom Rubin. "There's a tendency not to have good project management and not have good controls in place for the schedule, cost and quality assurance. The damn thing gets out of control, and before anybody really knows about it. Then people are tempted to cover it up and hide the problems before anybody else has time to clean them up."

Belleville-based consultant Wendell Cox says commissioners should shoulder more fault in out-of-control projects such as the MetroLink extension. Across the nation, Cox adds, board members get "led around with rings in their noses by management."

All blame aside, Salci knows his legacy is tied to Cross County's. Approaching St. Louis in the train from Emerson Park, he recalls, "The last thing I thought when I took this job three years ago was that I'd have to discharge the engineers and file a lawsuit. I was totally focused on the agency and its internal problems.

"That was an unwelcome surprise. But we had to do it." He pauses. "And ultimately I know I'll be judged on that."

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