A month into construction, the task of monitoring the nation’s largest private building endeavor is rapidly becoming bigger than Town of Malta officials expected.
The Town’s Building and Planning Department on Tuesday, Aug. 25, formally asked the Town Board to green light an expansion of the contract between the town and its chief consultants for the GlobalFoundries microchip factory project the Chazen companies and Evergreen Engineering to cover a number of inspection services that were not originally planned for.
After discussion, the Town Board agreed to draft a resolution and place it on the agenda at their next meeting, set for Tuesday, Sept. 8. All five members agreed the change would be necessary.
Building and Planning Coordinator Anthony Tozzi said that through conversations with consultants across the nation who are experienced in the field of chip fab construction, it became apparent that the workload involved with inspecting the budding facility would overwhelm the department in coming months. Without the outside help already provided, the momentum of the project would have already overtaken his staff, he said.
`If our consultants hadn’t been there, there might have been some design issues that were not caught by GlobalFoundries or [M+W] Zander,` Tozzi said.
The sheer magnitude of the project is a big issue, Tozzi continued, especially with only two building inspectors. The entire 200-year-old Town of Malta is assessed at $3.1 billion. The 1.3-million-square-foot Fab 2 will be $4.2 billion and is on course to be completed in two years. Once the economy improves, it’s certain that construction on various other projects in town will shift into high gear, as well.
Sitting ominously to the side during the workshop were construction plans for the fab, the volume of which required a hand truck to be moved comfortably.
There is also the matter of the extremely complex and expensive machinery that will be placed in the building, some of which will be working with hazardous materials and be replaced almost continuously. Complicated inspections not covered in the initial contract will be necessary to ensure that the facility remains safe, Tozzi said, and nobody is quite sure how much manpower that will take.
`We need to understand more about what the building contains before we know what inspection services will be needed,` Tozzi said. The town can start working out the details with consultants now that it’s clear an expansion of the contract will be approved.
The Building Department also requested that an additional consulting group be contracted to guide the specialized inspections on-site.
The original contract with Chazen and Evergreen was for $900,000, the cost of which will be absorbed by GlobalFoundries under state law and legislation passed by the town. Though it’s unclear how much more will be needed for the additional inspection services, the builder will continue to shoulder the burden.
That would be true of inspection costs for new equipment once the plant is operational, as well, Tozzi said. He likened it to replacing a hot water heater in one’s home, which requires a building inspection from the town to be paid for by the homeowner.
When embarking on the approval process, town officials had looked to IBM facilities in nearby East Fishkill as a model, but it quickly became apparent that the GlobalFoundries project at the Luther Forest Technology Campus is a different beast.
`We started to understand there’s a difference between building in East Fishkill and building in Malta,` Tozzi said.
In Fishkill, the town had a longstanding relationship with the builder and many of the structures were built decades ago.
Consultants on a conference call at the workshop said that establishing a relationship with GlobalFoundries now would make future tasks easier.
Jeff Jurrens, the retired fire marshal of Hillsboro, Ore., said that his city used five building inspectors during one of many fab constructions in the town, and over 12 years that plant completely replaced its equipment four times.
`Building the building is just the first step,` he said, adding that establishing a relationship with the operator is essential to success.
`You only get a small window of time to do your job and allow Global to be successful in building their plant,` he continued.
`If you don’t set precedence now, you don’t want to be reading in the paper or seeing on the news why life safety became an issue,` said Gene Paolini, former building inspector in Roseville, Calif., via conference call.
Matthew Jones, local attorney representing GlobalFoundries, said he appreciated efforts to bring all parties to the table.
`My sense is that the Building and Planning Department is overloaded. No one anticipated this would dominate the Building Department as much as it has, and what no one is disagreeing with is that they need more staff Both sides have an interest in doing it efficiently as well as safely,` he said.
Jones did caution against throwing all elements of the IBM Fishkill plans out the window without thoroughly examining the situation first.
`It is a shift in philosophy, and we just want to pay attention to that going forward,` he said.
Rick Whitney, of GlobalFoundries’ construction manager M+W Zander, said that it’s clear changes need to be made going forward.
`The volume of information is tremendous,` he said. `[East Fishkill has] a different model, and we believed that model would work here.`
The project is continuing to move along an aggressive timeline. Permits for construction of the foundation have already been issued, and permits for some temporary structures are about to go out. In the extremely competitive and fast-moving chip manufacturing industry, speed is of the essence, and it’s often up to host communities to provide the checks needed to ensure safe practices will be in place.
`An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure is especially appropriate for a high-tech facility,` Tozzi said.
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