Fort Smith Board agrees to settlement related to dispute over riverfront trail work

The Fort Smith Board of Directors agreed to a $130,171 settlement with SureTec Insurance Company and Dixon Contracting, over the city’s terminated contract with Dixon on the West River Front Trail Project.

Morlin Dixon, owner of Dixon Contracting, was fired from the project via letter from Parks Department Head Doug Reinert on Feb. 9. In the letter Reinert advised the city should “move into a settlement agreement concluding the Contract at the current state of performance and that the City complete the work through necessary contracts or use of its own forces.”

The Board voted Tuesday night (May 3) to follow Reinert’s recommendation at a meeting on Feb. 17. Dixon had hoped to finish the final portion of the project after completing approximately 91% of it, but city officials were unhappy with the work and the fact that the job was 57 days past due at that point.

Bobby Aldridge of Frontier Engineering acknowledged that there had been some weather delays that resulted in change orders rightfully delaying completion, but advised the city at the February meeting that Dixon’s subcontractors had pushed forward with certain work not according to an approved plan and much of the work was unsatisfactory, or as Aldridge put it “a bunch of little things that added up to a big thing.”

Dixon and his attorney, Matt Ketcham, argued that he should be allowed to finish the job, but also asserted the city “should pay” for approximately $45,000 in rework Dixon had to perform for lost seeding and topsoil as a result of flooding that occurred in December 2015.

Neither the city nor Dixon were insured for the damages.

In the end, Director and Vice-Mayor Kevin Settle, who is also an engineering manager at Exide Technologies, reminded Dixon the project stemmed from a $1 million grant from the Walton Family Foundation, and he “would have done everything I could have to finish this project.”

“It’s gone too far. Now we should let the courts handle it,” Settle added.

Tuesday’s $130,000 settlement will effectively keep the matter out of litigation, but it will also place the burden on subcontractors to go after Dixon and SureTec for any unpaid monies they may be owed. One of those subcontractors is electrician Sean O’Kelley, who was in attendance to implore the Board to find a resolution.

Since completing his work at the first of January, O’Kelley said, his business had suffered through a back-and-forth between the city and SureTec with each side saying the other was responsible for holdups.

“I feel I’ve been very patient waiting on this to be resolved,” O’Kelley said to City Directors Tuesday night. “I called the bonding company on this project, and they blamed the city. The representative from the city then blamed the bonding company. I feel like I’m being held hostage here and can’t get any questions answered so I can be paid what I am owed on this project. Please get something done on this. It is affecting my business.”

City Attorney Jerry Canfield said it would be possible with the settlement for O’Kelley and other subcontractors to seek unpaid monies from Dixon and SureTec, but there were also no guarantees.

“What happens then – if Dixon were to say there was a problem with the electrical work, for instance – I don’t know. The city is not trying to administer those claims between the sub and the contractor,” Canfield said, adding that it was in the city’s best interests to close a settlement deal so “the surety can no longer say it’s the city’s fault, and that ‘it’s the city holding us up.'”