Honolulu improvement projects have been plagued by delays, according to the findings in a recent audit of the city’s Department of Design and Construction.
The DDC supports capital improvement projects through planning, land acquisition, design, construction and inspections of public facilities.
The city auditor analyzed a few of the hundreds of DDC projects from fiscal years 2018 to 2022, and found that some had been delayed by months — or even years.
“In our judgmental sample of projects, the average project time from budget approval to completed construction was almost 5 years," City Auditor Arushi Kumar said in an email to the Honolulu City Council, who requested the audit.
"We also found that the completion of project close-out tasks in our sample took just as long, on average, as the construction period itself, and DDC did not meet its own internal metrics for completing projects on time,” Kumar continued.
The report highlighted the Kapolei Regional Park Skate Facility Expansion Improvements project, which was given its Capital Improvement Program funding by the city council in 2016.
The project was scheduled to be fully operational about three years after its approval, but it took about two years and four months for the DDC just to find a contractor and another year and six months to actually finish construction.
The audit said the project was still unfinished as of October because a final evaluation was still pending.
The city auditor highlighted some internal issues that could be contributing to the delays.
Generally, the auditor found that the DDC did not properly monitor its projects or follow its own operating procedures, leading to problems such as excessively long delays from change orders and document approvals.
The DDC also has a high number of vacancies, the audit found. About 27% of the department’s nearly 200 positions are not filled. Key positions like engineers and those involved in design and construction management positions have even higher vacancy rates.
“Because we are short-staffed, we're not able to commit as much time as we would like in the close-out process. It would take … a significant amount of time with the documentation, coordination with the designer, as well as the contractor, to get projects closed out,” said Haku Milles, DDC’s director.
“If we had our team commit time to the closeout process, that would mean that active projects under design and construction would suffer,” he added.
The DDC agreed with some of the findings from the audit but noted that some of the delays are out of its control. Change orders, for example, also require cooperation from other departments.
Milles also noted that the long-delayed Kapolei Regional Park project was an outlier. While most projects get approval and funding with a design already in place, the DDC employed a design-build method for the skate facility that didn’t have a design ready, contributing to at least some of the delay.
Still, the city auditor recommended that the department improve its internal operations to better track or speed up construction projects.
