A Metropolitan Council employee alleges in a lawsuit that Minneapolis-area agency officials subverted project controls for Metro’s Green Line Extension light rail project, allowing that the schedule would run years past the initial deadline and that costs would increase by more than $85 million.
Michael Janish is a licensed engineer who was project controls manager on the extension, formerly known as the Southwest Light Rail Transit project, from 2015 until it was reassigned in 2022. In his lawsuit, he accuses the Met Council and one of its bosses retaliated against him for raising issues about problems with the project. Officials say the cost of the project has increased from $2 billion to $2.86 billion and its completion date has been pushed back from 2023 to 2027.
The project is for a 14.5-mile light rail route extension that will add 16 stations to Minneapolis and four suburban communities.
The Met Council issued 658 change orders for the project through October 2022, according to a state auditor’s report last year. In his complaint, Janish alleges that Met Council leaders subverted project controls when they negotiated change orders with the contractor, Lunda/CS McCrossan Joint Venture, in order to “keep the government money flowing.”
In response to the complaint, the Met Council says the project has required so many change orders because of unforeseen site conditions and flaws in the project’s initial design. Janish’s objections to the process “reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of applicable law and industry practice,” attorneys representing the agency wrote.
AECOM Technical Services consulted for the Met Council, providing cost estimates for the various change orders. But Janish says in the complaint that the contractor’s cost estimates “fall short of” the estimates prepared by AECOM. It alleges that officials began accessing the contractor’s proposals before seeing independent estimates from AECOM and then let employees overseeing the change order process provide them to the contractor.
Neither Lunda/CS McCrossan JV nor AECOM are parties to the suit. A representative for the joint venture declined to comment and AECOM did not immediately respond to inquiries.
A 2021 Minnesota Legislative Auditor’s Office report highlighted concerns about the process that an AECOM executive had raised with Met Council staff. Janish’s complaint makes allegations similar to some of the concerns and details how he claims the Met Council improperly changed cost estimates.
According to Janish, Met Council management used formulas in an Excel workbook to add “arbitrary markups” to change the order’s cost estimates. His complaint highlights one example of two change orders related to the extension of a crash barrier between the Glenwood Avenue Bridge and Bryn Mawr Station. AECOM estimated the cost at $23 million. After the Met Council ran that estimate into the Excel file, Janish alleges the manipulated cost estimate ballooned to $35 million. But the contractor estimated the cost at nearly $100 million, and the Met Council went back to AECOM asking it to raise its estimate. The consultant refused, and the Met Council still agreed to pay about $92.5 million for the work associated with the two change orders.
The Met Council says in its response to the lawsuit that the negotiated costs for the change orders highlighted in the complaint were fair and that the Excel workbook was properly used to correct estimates that omitted or did not account for relevant factors such as site constraints.
Janish alleges in his lawsuit that Met Council leaders began “laying the groundwork for his ouster as a “poor-performing” employee in retaliation after he refused to approve “unlawful” change orders Then they pulled him from the Green Line project and reassigned him to another light rail project.
In its response, the Met Council wrote that the reassignment was a “lateral transfer” with equal opportunity for future growth and no decrease in compensation.
“The Metropolitan Council believes the allegations are completely without merit and will vigorously defend this lawsuit,” Met Council representative Terri Dresen said in a statement.
In the meantime, work continues on the project. Last August, the Met Council and Hennepin County reached an agreement to resolve a funding gap. And last month, at a meeting of the Met Council’s Transport Committee, Jim Alexander, the project manager, said construction of 11 stations was essentially complete, apart from some items on the drill list . About 10 kilometers of track had been laid and structural work had also been done on the 11 bridges involved in the project, he added.
“We had a pretty good year in 2023 with construction … but we still have a lot to do,” Alexander said.
