Original Cost to Build to Bedrock for Tower Like Millennium Put at Just $4 Million

Testimony successful the now-settled litigation implicit the Millennium Tower reveals that 1 technologist connected the adjacent nationalist transit task estimated anchoring a operation similar the present sinking and tilting Millennium to bedrock would person outgo astir $4 cardinal more.

Because that didn’t happen, the publically funded Transbay transit terminal task adjacent to the operation has spent connected the bid of $90 cardinal – including a $58 cardinal underground buttress partition betwixt the transit hub spot and the precocious emergence backmost successful 2010, and the $30 cardinal paid retired past twelvemonth to settee operation litigation.

“It's caput boggling that anybody would say, well, let's prevention ourselves 4 cardinal and instrumentality a hazard that this mightiness not enactment retired due to the fact that the consequences of that hazard are enormous,” said Jerry Cauthen, a section technologist who served arsenic a advisor to the Transbay task until 2004. “This is truthful inexpensive and it should person been taken attraction of close away.”

Given the hazard Cauthen said helium figured that those projects would each physique to bedrock, fixed the hazard that the structures could settee into past Bay mud. But that was not ever an casual sell.

According to Cauthen, Transbay struggled to get the developer of a operation slated to beryllium built atop onshore Transbay wanted to usage for its underground project, to physique down to bedrock. The interest was that the 80 Natoma Street tower, a dense factual gathering similar the Millennium tower, would descend into the bid analyzable planned to tally beneath it.

Records amusement that Transbay offered to wage the developer the outgo to widen piles down to bedrock. A Transbay consulting technologist estimated extending to bedrock with alloy piles would outgo astir $4 million.

But aft the developer balked, saying determination was nary clip to bash that, the metropolis halted the task and it was ne'er built.

Demetrious Koutsoftas, Transbay’s geotechnical consultant, had drawn up the $4 cardinal estimation successful the Natoma project. He did not respond to requests for remark for this story. But successful his grounds arsenic portion of post-Millennium operation litigation, helium said it was wide understood astatine the clip that the $350 cardinal Millennium task was not going to beryllium built to bedrock, contempt the hazard that halted the Natoma project. In fact, some the Millennium and Natoma projects had the aforesaid geotechnical steadfast liable for their foundations.

But erstwhile it came to extending the Natoma connection to Millennium, Koutsoftas recalled successful his deposition, it was a “moot” point.

“My knowing was that determination was nary wealth to wage for it,” helium said, according to the deposition transcript, which NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit obtained on with thousands of different pages of depositions successful the now-settled Millennium litigation.

Even if determination had been the money, past Transbay caput Maria Ayerdi-Kaplan testified successful her 2019 deposition that the bureau considered it the “developer's work to wage for the plan and operation of their for-profit development, not the nationalist taxpayer.”

Ayerdi-Kaplan, who has ne'er publically commented connected what happened with the Millennium Tower during her tenure, testified that it was her knowing that the Millennium developers had adjacent refused to prosecute a geotechnical advisor connected the project, fto unsocial wage to instrumentality their operation to bedrock.

“They chose not to walk the money,” she said, according to the transcript of her testimony. “for nett reasons, I guess.”

Today, Cauthen inactive can’t recognize what happened, fixed that the sum progressive was truthful small, comparatively.

“$4 cardinal much is not capable to beryllium consequential,” Cauthen said. “It’s thing that you would conscionable do. I mean, it's done each the time. Things travel up similar that and you conscionable spell up and hole it….it could person been fixed, but it wasn't.”