All Wet

Fries, whose parents are from Mexico, remembers a small playground at the edge of the site. When she started Vina Construction in 1989 and began doing electrical work for Kansas City Power & Light, she had dreams of becoming a general contractor and building big projects on the West Side.

"Regina really wanted this job," says Joy Parrish Vohs, a spokeswoman for Vina Construction. "She wanted to do this project so bad. More than any job she had ever wanted in her whole life. She wanted this one to be a winner."

Vina Construction had never handled a project of that size before and had primarily operated as an electrical subcontractor, but city sources say that locals rooted passionately for Fries. Everyone pictured the little West Side girl who had grown up in poverty coming back as an adult to transform the neighborhood with a dazzling new building. Now they downplay their support for Fries, but members of the West Side community, the Coalition of Hispanic Organizations and the Kansas City Hispanic Association Contractors Enterprise met with city officials to encourage the city to choose Fries, the only Hispanic bidder, to build the community center. They wanted a Hispanic to get the job. And they prevailed.

"We wanted to make sure she got fair consideration from the city," says Jerry Adriano of the association. "Historically, Hispanic contractors have been overlooked. We assumed she was qualified because the city let her bid."

At the end of April 1997, the parks and recreation board awarded the contract to Vina Construction. "There was lots of support in the Hispanic community for that particular contractor," McHenry says sheepishly. "They had the West Side connection. It just seemed like the right thing to do."

In May, the codes department finally completed its review of the plans. According to a parks department document, "extensive and time-consuming modifications were required to meet code approval." The project went back to the drawing board.

The city's slow pace and disorganization didn't help the inexperienced contractor. It wasn't until four months after awarding the bid that the city finished writing the contract and issued a notice telling Vina to proceed with the project. It took another four months before Vina received the necessary building permit from the city.

When Vina started construction on the 27,000-square-foot building February 9, 1998, the company encountered major problems with the rocky site. Vohs recalls that the geotechnical survey done by a city-hired consultant was "spotty" and did not reveal that the company would have to drill 80 feet to install concrete piers because the alternating layers of weak shale and limestone rock underground could not support the building.

"When construction began, they realized not only did they have drainage problems, but they were trying to set this massive structure on a hill they had no idea was basically rock," Vohs says.

That immediately cost the city an extra $175,000 on Vina's bid to excavate and remove rock not only for the piers but for the pool. To rebound from the initial setback and save some money, the city decided to eliminate a large amphitheater that had been planned outside the center.

Because Vina's bid could not account for designing and engineering changes made after its estimate was submitted, the company sought "a whole mess of change orders," Harriman says. Those seventeen amendments to the construction contract were "lost in a quagmire of papers on [Roque's] desk," he says. But Roque maintains that the delays were not her fault and were caused by normal parks department procedures. "I managed all the other community centers, and they turned out fine," Roque says.

The project's many change orders included $886 to "change interior signage to add Spanish," $34,000 to relocate an electrical transformer and $28,000 to buy more steel and masonry for the center's elaborate entry. Harriman says he and Vohs repeatedly delivered change orders to Roque that she did not process. But Roque denies that she stalled or lost change orders and says she did a good job on the project.

"Buildings go together in a sequence of events," Harriman says. "And if you've got a change order out there hanging and you've got no action being taken on that change order, I mean, nobody's telling you yes or no, then all of a sudden the sequence of events gets pretty muddled and the construction process slows down. And it did. Because those change orders sat on Victoria's desk, and no action was taken on them until she got around to doing it." The city regularly took months to process change orders on the project.

As the project wore on and other community centers funded by the car- registration tax rose on other sites around the city, word passed to McHenry, Roque's boss, that the West Side community center project had big problems.

"It became readily apparent that they were in over their heads," McHenry says of Vina Construction. "We were able to contrast and compare with other community centers and say, 'Hey, this isn't going so great.' They changed superintendents midproject, and that was an indicator. The progress of the work was slow -- very slow. They asked a lot of questions. They were having problems reviewing the plans, and you started to wonder if they even understood them."