State
Blue Mountain Eagle
Wednesday, September 7, 2016
A9
ODOT’s lax quality control
raises questions of fraud
By Nick Budnick
Capital Bureau
Potholes and ruts cost the
average Oregonian driver
hundreds of dollars in vehicle
repairs every year.
But as Oregon Depart-
ment of Transportation Di-
rector Matt Garrett prepares
to ask lawmakers for hun-
dreds of millions of dollars
in increased taxes and fees
on Oregonians to fund new
roads and bridge upgrades,
documents show that his de-
partment has for more than a
decade resisted basic quality
improvements intended to
stop construction fraud, com-
bat premature potholes and
make roads last longer.
Federal highway ofi-
cials have warned ODOT re-
peatedly since 2005 that its
road-paving inspection pro-
gram is vulnerable to fraud.
Because the department fails
to undertake basic precau-
tions, asphalt contractors
can game ODOT’s system to
make it appear standards were
met while compromising road
quality, similar to what Volk-
swagen did with diesel emis-
sions.
ODOT estimates it spends
$100 million a year on as-
phalt. In the past year, it used
about 1.6 million tons of it to
build new roads and rehabili-
tate existing ones.
For about two decades,
Oregon has relied on road
contractors to test their own
asphalt quality and show they
meet minimum standards.
State technicians do their own
tests to spot-check one-in-10
results.
Garrett maintains that
ODOT’s money is well spent,
that he has faith in the integ-
rity of Oregon’s construction
oversight system.
But the federal assessment
that Oregon is vulnerable to
trickery is echoed by some of
ODOT’s current and former
employees.
“Quality control was not
taken seriously,” says Bret Al-
ford, a longtime ODOT qual-
ity-control specialist who left
the agency in 2012. Oregon’s
contractor-driven oversight
system, he adds, “Seems like
the fox guarding the hens to
me.”
ODOT’s oversight system
creates a “huge risk of fraud,”
former ODOT internal auditor
Mary Hull Caballero, who in-
vestigated the state agency’s
construction practices exten-
sively, told Secretary of State
auditors in 2013, according to
a summary of the auditors’ in-
terview. Hull Caballero, who
is now the city of Portland’s
elected auditor, declined to
comment for this story.
While there are plenty of
good contractors out there,
“it is so easy for a contractor
to falsify documentation,”
says Carol Putnam, a former
ODOT quality assurance spe-
cialist who left the department
in 2013. “We don’t know
what goes on behind closed
doors.”
In 2014, the Federal High-
way Administration commu-
Contributed photo/Oregon Department of Transportation
A crew member checks the temperature of the
asphalt. Federal highway officials have warned
ODOT repeatedly since 2005 that its road-paving
inspection program is vulnerable to fraud.
nicated the results of a top-
to-bottom review of Oregon’s
quality control for road con-
struction conducted the pre-
vious year. Its recommenda-
tions largely echoed a report it
issued in 2005.
Rudimentary quality
checks
Since 2005, federal high-
way oficials have urged
Oregon to pursue electronic
data collection of quality test
results and to use statisti-
cal comparisons to look for
anomalies and bogus report-
ing.
Oregon, instead, does not
systematically track quality
results or use the statistical
tests that are common in other
states, according to the feder-
al review. Instead of tracking
numerous results statistically,
a technician will simply com-
pare the state’s result to the
contractor’s inding during
the spot-check conducted on
10 percent of tests.
“This method of verii-
cation is very weak and will
only detect severe problems
with contractor test results,”
according to a 2013 Federal
Highway Administration re-
port.
Much as it did when the
highway administration made
the same recommendation in
2005, ODOT has promised
to launch a study of the is-
sue. In July, work began on
a $300,000 study by a Texas
A&M Transportation Insti-
tute researcher who formerly
worked for the pavement in-
dustry.
Not only is Oregon’s rudi-
mentary spot-check method
weak and vulnerable to fraud,
the state doesn’t do enough
spot-checking to determine if
it has a problem, according to
the feds.
In a November 2014
memo requesting funding to
study potential quality im-
provements, ODOT’s top
quality assurance engineer,
Greg Stellmach, wrote that
data gathered that year sug-
gested that contractors are
not following ODOT rules on
random quality testing. That,
in turn, can have a “huge
impact” on the department’s
spending on asphalt, he wrote.
Faulty asphalt test
Oregon’s roads use asphalt
generated by privately owned
asphalt plants. Oregon, how-
ever, continues to test the as-
phalt at the plant itself, using
a system that allows the plant
operator to know generally
when the contractor’s self-test
sample is supposed to be tak-
en. That allows the operator
to temporarily “optimize” the
asphalt mix to meet quality
standards, according to the
2014 memo by Stellmach,
the ODOT quality expert.
Not only that, but the plant
operator has plenty of time to
switch to a different mix when
it sees a state quality techni-
cian drive up to double-check
the contractor’s self-test, ac-
cording to the federal audit.
Fraud by asphalt plants is
not an abstract concern. Doc-
uments show that in 2008,
an ODOT pavement engi-
neer resigned in protest and
warned the Federal Highway
Administration of an “uneth-
ical” failure by ODOT man-
agement to investigate what
he concluded was contractor
fraud by an asphalt supplier.
Similarly, Alford, the for-
mer ODOT quality specialist,
says he heard from a friend
who worked for an asphalt
contractor that there literal-
ly was a switch the operator
could lip to meet quality stan-
dards when the ODOT inspec-
tor showed up.
Oregon is the only state
west of the Rockies to still
test at the plant. Most western
states test closer to the paving
machine as it lays asphalt on
the roadbed.
ODOT Construction and
Materials Engineer Joe Squire
says testing the asphalt behind
the paver would endanger the
employee doing the testing.
However, a 2007 University
of Illinois survey of state de-
partments of transportation
found that “sampling behind
the paver is being conducted
by many states without much
dificulty.”
A recipe for potholes
Another major issue for
ODOT is compaction, mean-
ing the use of those giant yel-
low rollers to get the asphalt
to meet the required mini-
mum density. Density tests
after compaction are used to
determine bonus payments to
contractors.
A Portland-area ODOT
project manager, Ron Larson,
explained the issue to state
auditors in 2013. “The high-
er the compaction, the longer
(the roadway) lasts,” he said,
according to notes of his in-
terview. “Problems in this
area are what eventually form
potholes.”
Poor compaction and low
density, he said, is ODOT’s
“biggest problem” on projects
that go bad.
And yet contractors can
use rollers to game the den-
sity tests, as ODOT oficials
have acknowledged. The
contractors whose rollers are
compacting the asphalt often
know in advance the locations
where the density of their
product is going to be tested,
allowing them to manipu-
late the system, according to
ODOT’s top quality expert.
“Frequently the locations
that the density shots should
be taken at are marked along
the pavement at the tonnage
where the test needs to be
taken,” Stellmach wrote in
the 2014 ODOT document
discussing weaknesses in
Oregon’s system. “This al-
lows the roller operators to
be aware of test locations and
potentially inluences the pat-
tern that they make in rolling
the asphalt. The (contractors’)
density technician may also
ask the roller operator to do
additional compaction in a
location that has not met com-
paction requirements.”
Stellmach, in a telephone
interview in which his boss,
Joe Squire, and two public re-
lations specialists were listen-
ing in, said that he has no evi-
dence that gaming the system
is a problem. Squire, for his
part, said “the vast majority
of pavements within the Ore-
gon highways system is rated
fair to good or better, which is
very high among states.”
Contractor
technicians
who cheat on tests face po-
tential criminal charges and
ines. Squire and Stellmach
noted the state has suspended
several technicians in recent
years, one of whom was sus-
pected of fraudulent misrepre-
sentation.
Alford, for his part, says
he saw a dynamic at ODOT
that was focused on getting
things done on time as well
as excessive coziness be-
tween contractors and his
coworkers, including proj-
ect managers. Once, he pro-
tested that he would sign
only truthful quality reports.
A manager responded that
Alford would sign whatev-
er report he was told, “or I
would be out of a job,” Alford
recalls.
We know
Oregon Department of Forestry/Marcus Kauffman
Consultant Kelpie Wilson, right, helps unload
a farm-scale biochar kiln during a recent
conference at Oregon State University in
Corvallis. Welding students at Umpqua
Community College have built kilns for a group
of farmers experimenting with making and
applying biochar.
Biochar project
seeks to demonstrate
its application to ag
By Eric Mortenson
EO Media Group
An ongoing biochar
project in Southern Oregon
might clarify the agricultural
role of a product and tech-
nology that has been talked
about for years and has fer-
vent backers, but hasn’t yet
broken through to commer-
cial success.
Coordinated by the
Umpqua Biochar Education
Team and funded with a two-
year, $75,000 grant from
USDA’s Natural Resources
Conservation Service, 10
farmers have spent the past
year learning to make bio-
char and combine it with
compost for application on
pastures.
“The idea was to work
with farmers who have live-
stock and take two waste
streams — manure and
woody debris — and com-
bine them to make a really
valuable soil amendment,”
said Kelpie Wilson, a biochar
consultant who helps coordi-
nate the work.
The farms involved range
from a century farm of almost
1,000 acres that raises grass-
fed beef to a small hobby
farm of perhaps ive acres,
and producers who raise dairy
goats, pastured pork and sell
eggs at farmers markets. The
farms are in Douglas, Jackson
and Josephine counties.
The UBET team is docu-
menting the work and at the
end of the grant period will
produce technical papers that
can be shared by extension
ofices and followed up by
NRCS.
The Umpqua work will
increase understanding of
biochar and its beneits, said
Todd Peplin, Conservation
Innovation Grant program
manager for NRCS in Port-
land. Small farms may be the
irst avenue for its agricultural
application, he said, and the
conservation grant program is
well-matched to support that
work.
Biochar is essentially
charcoal produced by burning
material such as logging slash
or ield straw in the presence
of little oxygen. The resulting
material retains moisture and
nutrients, sequesters carbon
and has shown great promise
to improve soil, boost crop
yields, cleanup old mining
sites, capture pollutants from
stormwater runoff, absorb
odor and other uses.
However, the technology’s
advance has been stop and go.
To some degree, the di-
versity of biochar sources and
potential applications works
against it.
“It’s too spread out, so it
doesn’t have a sector that’s
really a champion for it,” said
Tom Miles, who chaired an
Aug. 22-25 biochar confer-
ence hosted by Oregon State
University’s College of For-
estry.
About 300 people attend-
ed the conference, including
researchers, educators and
producers.
Wilson, the consultant,
said biochar production
could be a natural for small
farms that have burn piles
and manure they need to deal
with.
The project has resulted
in spinoff activity at Umpqua
Community College, where
welding students are mak-
ing farm-sized steel kilns
that provide the controlled
burning necessary to pro-
duce biochar. Students also
participate in the kiln design
process, Wilson said.
“That was part of our
goal in the (NRCS) grant,”
she said. “We wanted to see
if this could stimulate a new
small industry in the area.
“I think a lot of rural
landowners would like to
have one of these,” she said.
Farmers “spend a lot of time
burning things, and with this
they can do it with very little
smoke and get something for
their effort.”
For more information vis-
it ubetbiochar.blogspot.com.
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