Major Projects

Joint DOT/FHWA Major Project Webinar (May 2015) - Transcript

May 5, 2015

Presented by

Jim Sinnette
Center for Innovative Finance Support
FHWA

LaToya Johnson
Center for Innovative Finance Support
FHWA

Andy Brinkerhoff
FHWA WI Division Field Operations Engineer

Ryan Luck
WisDOT SE Freeways Construction Chief

Bob Gutierrez
WisDOT SE Freeways Design Chief

Mark D. Rolfe
ConnDOT District Engineer

John S. Dunham
ConnDOT Assistant District Engineer

Bryan Kendro
PennDOT Director of the Public-Private Partnership Office

Gary Kleist
PennDOT Project Manager - P3 Rapid Bridge Replacement

Dean El-Baz
PennDOT Consultant Program Manager

Operator: Please stand by. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the joint DOT-FHWA Major Project webinar. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. If you should require assistance during the call, please press star then zero. I'd like now to turn the conference over to your host, Michael Kay. Please go ahead, sir.

Michael Kay: Thank you, Jessica, and on behalf of the Federal Highway Administration's Innovative Program Delivery office, I'd like to welcome everyone to our joint DOT-FHWA Major Project webinar. My name is Michael Kay and I'm with the USDOT's Volpe Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and today I'll be facilitating our webinar and helping to address any technical problems you have and moderating our question-and-answer periods. I'll introduce Jim Sinnette, the project delivery team leader, momentarily, but before he begins, I just want to point out a couple of features of the webinar room. First, on the top left, is the audio call-in information. You're welcome to listen over your computer speakers; however, if you do have any bandwidth issues, I do recommend that you dial in using that toll-free number. Below that is the attendee list. Below that is a file share box where you can download a PDF version of today's presentation. Simply click on the presentation, click Download Files, and follow the prompts on your screen. Finally, on the bottom left, is a chat box that you can use to ask questions at any point throughout the webinar. Our webinar is scheduled to run until three thirty p.m. Eastern time today, and we are recording today's webinar so that anyone unable to join us can review the material at a later time. I just want to pull up a couple of poll questions that will help us better understand our audience. The first one is what is your affiliation, whether you're with the Federal Highway division, outside of the division office, a state DOT, another federal agency, other transportation agency, or other. And actually, I'm realizing we don't have division office in there, so bear with me a second. I'm just going to add that to our poll here. Let's start over with that poll. So, division office, non-division office, state DOT, another federal agency that's not Federal Highway, and another transportation agency that's not a state DOT, or other. And then on the right side, how many people are participating with you today, whether you're sitting alone at your desk perhaps or around a conference room table with as many as ten or more. So let's wait about ten more seconds to allow you to answer those questions. It's nice to see we have a couple of groups, at least one or two, with more than ten people, and also a couple of groups of five to ten. That's really great to see. Okay, with that, I will close those polls out. I will return to our - and I'd like to turn the webinar over to Jim Sinnette. Jim?

Jim Sinnette: Hey, thank you Michael, and welcome everybody. This is our Major Project quarterly webinar, but twice a year, every other webinar, we invite our external partners, state DOTs, to not only participate and attend the webinar but to give presentations, and this time we have Wisconsin, Connecticut and Pennsylvania giving us presentations on some pretty relevant major people issues. Just looking over the poll results, I'm sort of interested - I think there were three people that put in Other as their agency. I'd be sort of interested if you could put it in the chat pod just what your group was. It'd be sort of interesting to see what those others were. Just like Michael said, I think it's great that we have at least one group of ten or more people attending the webinar. But for these webinars, what we do is we start off with the Major Project Spotlight, and we're going to have three presentations from our state DOTs, and then we're going to finish with a very quick update on major project issues. We're going to talk about the recently updated financial plan guidance. We're going to go over some new major statistics as a result of the recent major projects call. We'll talk about the upcoming major project webinars, and of course there will always be an opportunity for comments and questions. Since we have a very full agenda, I'm going to turn it over immediately to LaToya Johnson, who is our Federal Highway Major Project Discipline Champion.

LaToya Johnson: Thanks, Jim, and hello everyone. Welcome to our joint Federal Highway-DOT webinar. I'm glad you all could join us. I'm going to limit my comments today other than to say that I think we have a very exciting agenda and I'm appreciative to all the speakers for being so willing to provide lessons learned and best practices from their states. With that, we'll just jump right in to our first presentation, which will come from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, and they're going to talk a little bit about the Major Projects program in Wisconsin and then provide some lessons learned and best practices for project management on major projects. Wisconsin has a long history with major projects and they've learned a lot over the years, and they will be providing some of that information during their presentation. So with that, we have three speakers today from Wisconsin, the first being Andy Brinkerhoff, who is actually from the Federal Highway division in Wisconsin, and Andy is a field operations engineer and a major projects engineer. He's served in that position for the past five years, and currently he's working on several major projects, working with DOT to deliver several major projects in Wisconsin, and really focusing on utilizing a cradle-to-grave approach for his responsibilities from the division offices aspect. Then we'll hear from Bob Gutierrez, who is a 26-year veteran of the WisDOT, and he currently serves as the Southwest Freeways Design Chief in the southeast region of the state. He has extensive planning, design and construction experience, and over the years he's devoted time on the Zoo Interchange Reconstruction Project, which you'll hear a little bit more about today, which is a 1.7- billion-dollar project that is currently under construction, and he's also been engaged on the I-94 North- South major project. Lastly from Wisconsin you will hear from Ryan Luck, and Ryan is the Chief of Construction for the Southwest Freeways group of the department, and currently he is responsible for several mega or major projects in southeast Wisconsin including, again, the Zoo Interchange Project, working on the I-94 North-South Freeway Project, and the Lakefront Gateway Projects in Metro Milwaukee. So with that, I will turn it over to Andy to kick it off. Andy?

Andy Brinkerhoff: Hi. Thanks, LaToya. Hi, everyone. I'm just going to try and give a real quick overview of WisDOT's major projects, and then I'll just try to hit on a few key points, and the websites will be on the end of the slides for anybody who might want more information, and then I'm going to hand it over to the WisDOT folks. Go ahead and advance the next one. So, currently right now there are 12 major projects ongoing in Wisconsin. Seven of them are in final design or construction and five are in the NEPA phase. The majority of the projects are in the Milwaukee and Madison areas. The first one I'm going to talk about is the I-94 North-South project. It's been under construction since 2009. It's a 35- mile reconstruction and expansion project that extends from the city of Milwaukee down to the Illinois state line. Included in it is mainline expansion from six to eight lines and includes reconfiguration of 18 new interchanges and the construction of one new interchange. One of the interchanges is the Mitchell Interchange, which is a system interchange providing connection from I-94 to I-894, I-43, and the General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee. The Mitchell Interchange was completed in late 2013 and included three new cut-and-cover tunnels. EDC accelerated bridge construction technologies were used on the project, including the use of a self-propelled modular transporter in the construction of the Rawson Avenue Interchange. This involved the use of prefabricated columns and a pier cap, with the bridge being built in two sections on temporary shoring next to I-94, and then it was moved into place in one night. LaToya mentioned the Zoo Interchange. It has been under construction since 2012. It's in the city of Milwaukee. The interchange is a four-level system interchange located in a tight urban environment in the Milwaukee area. It includes the reconstruction of six service interchanges and three adjacent arterial roadways. It's also a POCI for Federal Highway. The project includes the construction of 65 structures and over 100 retaining walls. It included installation of adaptive signal controls along the reconstructed adjacent arterials and initial results have shown that the signals are highly effective. Next project I was going to touch on very quickly was US-41. It's been under construction since 2009.

It's over 80 percent complete. It's expanding and reconstructing two separate sections of US-41, one in Brown County, which is the Green Bay area, and one in the Winnebago County, which is the Oshkosh area. US-41 was just approved for designation as I-41 and signs will be going up this summer, with the route will officially be becoming an interstate. This project has included the construction of a new eight- lane causeway over Lake Butte des Morts and the Erie construction reconfiguration of 16 interchanges, including two major system interchanges, one with I-43 and with one Wisconsin Highway 29. The US-41 project included construction of a total of 110 structures, 120 retaining walls, and over 9.2 million cubic yards of excavation. It also has included the construction the 24 roundabouts. Mainly these have been at the service ramp terminals. Moving on to another project, the Wisconsin 441/US-10 Tri-County Freeway Project. It just began construction last year. This project is reconstructing and expanding Wisconsin 441/US-10 and it includes also the reconfiguring of the system interchange with the new I-41. The project also includes the construction of a new structure over Little Lake Butte des Morts. It's actually located in the Appleton Metropolitan area. In addition to the system interchange with I-41, it's going to include the reconstruction and reconfiguration of four other interchanges, and one of those is Wisconsin's first diverging diamond interchanges. The project will also include ITS technologies and lightings, enhanced freeway safety and reliability. Like I said, the construction is underway on the new structure. Part of optimizing the constructability, a portion of the existing structure has been closed off to traffic to serve as contractor access in constructing the new structure. It also has instituted the construction of a temporary causeway to provide access for constructing the bridge piers. Moving on to another project here is the I-39/90 project. It is to begin construction this year. They've been doing some minor construction for alternate routes and ITS over the past few years. The project is a 45-mile reconstruction and expansion project that extends from the city of Madison down to the Illinois state line. It's going to include the reconstruction of 11 interchanges, including two major system interchanges and two diverging diamonds. The project is going to be managed in three separate segments with separate teams working on each segment and a corridor management team providing oversight over the entire project. The project will be funded in three phases with the mainline expansion being completed under the first phase of the project and then reconstruction and reconfiguration of what they call the Beltline System Interchange outside of Madison in the second phase, and then a potential future improvements on a portion of the Beltline west of the Beltline Interchanges as a third phase. Another project - we're not the lead on - but it's the St. Croix River Crossing. Minnesota DOT is the lead agency. We're sharing costs associated with the new structure and constructing the Wisconsin approaches, which include the construction of Wisconsin Highway 64 to the new crossing, the relocation of Wisconsin Highway 35, the construction of a new Wisconsin Highway 35 and County E interchange and a new bike-ped facility. This project is currently about 50 percent complete. It has a unique structure that's using a series of short towers with cables that connect to the bridge deck, and an existing lift bridge will be converted to a bike-ped facility. Construction challenges on this project have included dealing with harsh winters and high water levels and dealing with erosion control on the Wisconsin approaches, and working through contractor and laborer issues. Another major project in Wisconsin is the I-43 North-South project. It's currently in final design stage with construction scheduled to begin in 2018. It's a 14-mile reconstruction and expansion project, and that is located just north of the city of Milwaukee. We actually signed the record of decision in November of 2014. The project is going to include the reconstruction of seven interchanges and the construction of one new interchange. One of the interchanges will be a diverging diamond and another will convert an existing partial interchange into a full interchange. And then the five projects that are listed above are in the NEPA phase. They all include major reconstruction and potential capacity expansion, and they're all located in Wisconsin's most heavily traveled highways. And I tried to go through this very, very quickly and just give some small facts, but additional information about each of these study projects can be found on WisDOT's website, so if anybody had any other questions they can go there. And that's all I wanted to do, was just lead in with a quick intro for WisDOT, and I think I'm going to be handing it over to Bob now.

Bob Gutierrez: Fantastic. Thanks. Again, introduction: Bob Gutierrez, Wisconsin Department of Transportation. So, Josh is just going to pull up our -

Andy Brinkerhoff: Yep, let me just change the screen there.

Bob Gutierrez: So last week we welcomed Deputy Secretary Mendez and showcased the North-South project, and it was a really interesting conversation with him, and we talked a lot about how our delivery system incorporates a lot of best practices that we're going to be showing you today. He had some kind words for the FHWA office, and we're going to get going here. So, WisDOT, Southeast Region. We're currently delivering our third federal major project. We use "mega project" here in Wisconsin because we have another program that's called the Major, so I apologize if we have a little confusion there. It is a POCI project. In fact, we just finished a 5000-page, 350-million-dollar plan set for the Zoo Interchange, one of the busiest and oldest interchanges in Wisconsin. So, again, I want to share some of our program delivery topics and best practices on the zoo program. There we go. So, the zoo program, the Zoo Interchange, incorporates performance-based practical design in its footprint and selected alternatives.

I just want to talk a little bit about the delivery system we're using and the four best practices all leading to quality, cost, and schedule. We're going to start with our organizational chart. It's our key organizational chart that we use in all of our mega projects kind of statewide. It includes also a key matrix of risk, cost and responsibilities. So our regional project delivery - go to the next one, thank you - includes design, construction, control scheme, and our technical support. We also have, to the left, you can see the PI supplement. We need to include the bureau involvement, which is our central office.

They really help us deliver the program. They standardize and validate and really share statewide consistency in our mega project delivery. I want to talk a little bit about our key matrix and defining our program process. So we talk a lot about risk, responsibility, and project types. So, just the key to this matrix is PMs, project managers, come and go. It's a system that keeps our projects successful, and we really model it on the Green Bay Packers. I just had to throw that in, because that's exactly what this key matrix will help us do. And you can see what we do here in Wisconsin, we've got a Mega, or Federal Majors program. We've got a High-Profile program, and we just have our standard Important projects that we put into this matrix. So let's talk a little bit about internal and external. So, early and often is the key to success. So we talk about the industry, and our key stakeholders, our major employers, tourism, Major League Baseball, and such. So we talk a lot about bid ability, risk management, contractor feedback, and the use of 3D modeling. So, our process includes a key matrix here that we're showing and communication points, and that's what it's all about. It's all about early inclusion of both internal and external comments and resolutions. So this is our key to our system. So, being a key delivery system, we include all the newest innovation things - 4D design - to help really facilitate this entire process, and it's really a key to delivering our project. Internal communication. We talk about working side-by-side with our construction folks and other people that are trying to leverage technology, and so what we're doing is, with our plan sets - and I just mentioned that, 5000-page plan set - we're using BIM Field 360 to help us manage and organize all that. So as you can see, we use Autodesk BIM 360. Our last plan set had over 1400 construction comments and - want to help with this Josh? I'm not exactly sure what - we were tracking - yeah, we were tracking issues and closed, our total comments and then our closure of comments. So we start and we end. And what we're really trying to key in here is the acceptance and common constructive comments that allow our trust triangle to really go into place. So a breakdown of those comments, those 1400. So we got plan detail deficiencies, about 30 percent; we got best practices, 20 percent; overall picture, 18 percent; clarification of content and intent, 18 percent; and then we have our constructability at 13 percent. So how do we do that? So our construction folks go to task and they take that plan set and, using BIM 360 and this new technology, they're able to spotlight that. And here's just an example of what a construction comp would be - reduce the 12-foot lanes to 11-foot - and this is how we recreate that. We have an author, we have a root cause, and status. So the status is open at that point in time.

Ryan Luck: All right. Well thanks, Bob. What Bob and I decided to share - this is Ryan - and we wanted to just show some of how the best and most innovative practices that we've evolved to deliver or mega or major projects with. So, Bob manages the design and he was showing two areas where he improved communication and outreach with industry, and also opened up his design process for feedback from, or critique, from the construction folks. Because I run a construction program that's got over 12 years now of major-mega projects experience, and we learned that we need to provide mechanisms to continually improve and get a better quality plan set, a more biddable plan set, and one that reflects and accurate constructability out in the field. And so I'm going to talk briefly about two areas that I wanted to share on the construction side that's helped improve quality, schedule and cost. The first one would be a design construction interface engineer, and what I'd like to share is that Bob has kind of become a functional expert with his group on the mega side on design, and my group is highly experienced in the mega process of construction. While we each would be very successful in our own right, it's become very obvious that we both have to find ways to interface, and the complexity of our work is also great.

The specifications are in the hundreds, and the interface that we have with industry, with specifications - both standard specs and special provisions - with technical committees, is almost overwhelming. So I decided to actually institutionalize an engineer that focuses specifically on change processes and interfaces. The first one that this engineer handled, what we've bought into, is called a Construction Feedback-to-Design Process. As we've found, if you don't establish a clear process and resource it, it just kind of languishes or is inefficient. It sputters, and certain efforts can be - they need to be timely if you're not going to make the next plan set. So like Bob said, we have approximately 350 million that's going to go out the door to bid, and we want to make sure we can feed back our lessons learned from the field and get them back into the plan sets quickly. So we've developed our own term - sorry, I got to go back - our own process here, where we've created our own form, where we fill it out, we make sure that the question and the facts in question are documented. We try to research if this problem has happened in the past. We try to document who's bringing it up and why, do we have some examples, what type of money could we save, what type of external and internal folks should be involved in this change process, and it's worked out really well for us. We're continuing to develop it, and we think it's going to give us some really good feedback. We currently have 70 feedback-to-design - we call them FBTDs - and we've actually made modifications in 50 areas on our design manual and three of ours have actually affected statewide processes. So we're starting to get better at it. We're continuing to invest in it. We also are trying to use this process and have this interface engineer interconnect on statewide technical involvement, because those processes are always ongoing, and we need to find ways to plug in, bring real information from the field into those technical committees, and that's been very helpful.

And then we also are looking at trying to get into our performance base. Our MAPSS in Wisconsin is our very transparent method of tracking performance measures, and we're trying to leverage improvement in those areas as well by improving specifications and always trying to get more biddable projects and documenting lessons learned. The second area in construction that we've found very valuable is - Bob did not go into it, and I understand there's going to be some extensive discussion on 3- and 4D modeling - but the Zoo Interchange had extensive investment in three-dimensional modeling, and on the construction side, we didn't want all that investment to just sit there in a computer and not be able to kind of change our decision-making processes out in construction. So we've invested in a CIM engineer, a Civil Integrated Management engineer, to try to take the three-dimensional models that we've built, in addition to the 5000-page two-dimensional plan set, and tried to bring it into the field office and try to slowly change our culture so that we can tap into that information. So some of the ways that we do that have also been to try to add mobility with that information. So while it's taken us a while to try to get approvals to be innovative on the IT side, we have made some progress on having some ruggedized, wireless Trimble tablets to improve bringing the data set, the three-dimensional component, out to the field to the engineers in the very high-complex projects in the heart of the Zoo Interchange. So you can kind of see that picture there with 40 pounds of plan sets sitting in the back of your car. We're moving slowly forward on trying to bring that out to the field, in their hands, so that they can be more effective and make quick and fast decisions with all the information at their disposal. In addition, not only are we trying to bring it out into the field, we're also trying to bring it into field office. Once we've got the design, we're also trying to move into phased or staged design. We find that a lot of our change orders often are driven by clearances with staged conflicts due to temporary shoring, things like that, safety issues. So we're trying to work very hard to bring it into the office. For example, we were working on something last week where we pulled up - I don't know if it was this exact shot, but something similar to this. We were trying to get the clearance from the proposed pier that we were about to build, and we were putting in contractor-designed shoring systems, and we were trying to figure out clearances from existing roadways. So we are really trying to use the model and change how we make decisions as a team in our field offices such as this, with these mobile devices and the new information. We haven't figured it out yet, but we are really trying to work hard to get the people to use the technology. And on another front we wanted to share, to try to move forward with efficiency in construction. We've moved forward with this product, Bluebeam Revu Software for electronic as-builds. While there's a lot of future decisions to be made on legacy systems or the future of electronic document management, we feel that this has turned the corner on efficiency for us. So we've purchased a lot of licenses and we are allowing our engineers to actually as-built and edit the actual electronic plan sheets in real-time, and you can even do things such as bring photographs, like this one that you see above, and you can link it into the actual final as-built sheet that will be in the department's archives for the future. And then lastly, managing these complex projects. We do need to kind of - so, this is one of the tools we call a TIVIT, Traffic Impact Visualization and Implementation Tool. That's a mouthful, but what we've found with our major projects is we sometimes need to take it to another level to visually combine all the closures. So in this situation, red is long-term closures, green are open roadways, yellow are detour routes for certain closures. So when we have transit companies, stakeholders, we have the Milwaukee Brewers, we have all of the different entities, sometimes they need to be - you have to process the information, recraft it so that they can digest it and plan accordingly. So it's kind of like bringing the information to the stakeholder. We as engineers know how to interpret it, but sometimes businesspeople and decision makers for State Fair Park or a public baseball team, they need to understand it a little bit differently. So, those are the areas I wanted to share from the construction side, and we think we're making a lot of progress on that front. And I think with that, Bob and I, we're going to close, and open it up for any questions.

Michael Kay: Great. Thanks a lot, gentlemen. Let me just pull up our presentation again. And there's their contact information, which you can also download through the file share box, and Andy's as well. And we have a few minute for questions. We're going to hold off on phone questions for the time being, and time permitting we will turn to those at the end. But if you do have questions, we encourage you to submit them through the chat box. I'll expand our chat box briefly, and while we're waiting for any to come in, I just wanted to mention I did add now to the file share box a PDF version of that latter WisDOT presentation. They also have an interactive version online, and gentlemen, I don't know if you wanted to share that link, but I can do so, or you can do so if you'd like.

Ryan Luck: Yeah, you can share that.

Michael Kay: Okay. I'll add that to the chat box. I see we have a couple people typing, so we'll just wait a minute and see if any questions come in. And I added a link to the interactive WisDOT presentation that you can view online. Well, all right. Thanks a lot to everyone in Wisconsin, and I will turn it back over to LaToya.

LaToya Johnson: Thank you, Michael, and thank you Andy and Bob and Ryan. I just will continue to encourage the participants, if you have any questions, please go ahead and enter them into the chat pod, and if you don't think of anything now, Bob and Ryan and Andy are definitely great resources and you have their email addresses, so reach out to them and get additional information. I see that we just got a couple of questions in the chat pod, so before we go to the next partnership - we have a little bit of time - we'll just back up for a second and get to these questions. So to Bob or Ryan, question is coming from I think Colorado: Is WisDOT using design-build procurement?

Ryan Luck: At this time, our state statute does not allow design-build. We've had one design-build project in the last 20 years, but at this point, yeah, no, we're just the standard design-bid-build.

LaToya Johnson: I guess as a follow-up, is there much talk in the state or are any activities going on to try to get that enabled in legislation, that ability?

Bob Gutierrez: Yeah, so actually we've got a pilot program, and I think we're going to try to incorporate within the next legislative bill our four or five projects in the CMCG type of delivery system. Of course, that's a great system, allowing the contractor to come onboard early and often, and then give their insights into the project on constructability, and then of course the ability to actually procure the job in the end, so.

Ryan Luck: And I think our movement towards trying to get the industry involved earlier, at 60 percent, and actually building those relationships and pipelines for them to feed back is probably, like you said, a move towards ultimately being in partnership with contractors earlier, maybe in some sort of design- build arena. But not yet in Wisconsin.

LaToya Johnson: Okay, thank you guys. Thanks Bob, thanks Ryan. And with that, we will move on to our next presentation, and it is coming from the Connecticut DOT, and Mark Rolfe and John Dunham will be talking about how they're using 3D and 4D modeling on the I-96 New Haven Harbor Crossing Corridor Improvement Program up in Connecticut. So, just very briefly, Mark is a district engineer with the Department. He currently oversees approximately 1.6 billion dollars of active construction projects, including the 2-billion-dollar major project you're going to hear a little bit more about in a second.

Previously Mark has worked on other major programs in the state, including I-95 in Bridgeport and the 560-million-dollar BRT project that's west of Hartford. John Dunham, he's the Assistant District Engineer for District 3A and 4 in Connecticut, and he manages a combined staff of 60 engineers and construction professionals and over a billion dollars of active construction projects. He's currently managing construction for the I-95 New Haven Corridor Project as well as the recently completed Connecticut FasTrak program, and that was Connecticut's first ever bus rapid transit program. So with that, I will turn it over to Mark to tell us a little bit more about how Connecticut is using 3D and 4D modeling.

Mark?

Mark Rolfe: Thank you, LaToya. Good afternoon, everyone. LaToya, I wanted to first start off by thanking you for inviting Connecticut, the DOT here, to share experiences with digital modeling on our major projects here in New Haven. So, today's presentation, I'm going to give you a quick overview of what we're doing with 3D modeling across the department. I'm going to discuss 3D modeling here in the Q Bridge program, and then talk about how it's been used to benefit, and I've asked John to do that. But speaking to our department-wide modeling efforts, Connecticut DOT is increasingly using digital modeling across a broad spectrum of projects. We're using Bentley software, which is capable of providing dynamic views to generate true-to-life details that automatically change as the design changes. Additionally, we're updating our design deliverables to include submission of a geospatially- correct 3D model that will be provided to our contractors for use building the project. Let me give you a quick overview of our program. This is in oblique aerial view of the Q Bridge program area in New Haven. It's a 7.2-mile reconstruction program. It's about 2 billion dollars in construction value. This is the centerpiece of it. Obviously we can't show all 7.2 miles. In the background is the Q Bridge, the Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge. It's an extradosed cable structure that when complete will be ten lanes wide. In the foreground is the interchange of Interstate 95 and 91, and State Route 34. Those are three limited- access highways. It involves the construction of 18 new bridges, 12 highway ramps, and the removal of 21 existing bridges, all while maintaining in excess of 150 thousand vehicles every day. The starting point for any 3D model is existing condition, and this is a rendering of what we had on the Q corridor before we started. And of course this is leading to the final condition, and this is what the project will look like when we're done. I should say our project started highway construction activity in 2004. We're approaching 85 percent complete now. We're looking forward to an on-time completion in 2016. As with any simulation, the process is the existing condition disappears as the final condition appears, and this will be the final condition. There are a wide range of benefits with 3D and 4D modeling, and some of it was touched on by our colleagues in Wisconsin. Some of the more important areas are enhancing collaboration. It allows for cooperation and communication among all the team players. All project team members and stakeholders will see a single integrated view of the project in the construction staging, thus facilitating better understanding of the project and the project intent. It allows for and facilitates better communication with stakeholders. It allows all stakeholders to see a consistent and gain a visual understanding of what the project comprises early in the planning phase, right through construction. And then the last thing I'd like to mention, it allows for increased safety and potentially reduces risk. The 3D or 4D model can act as a QA/QC mechanism to reduce plan conflicts, find errors and clashes before construction begins, and we'll talk a little bit about more of some of those as we go on. This is a program collaboration diagram, something that we thought was very useful, because it illustrates the shared data of the digital model. It describes the two-way workflow between the owner, the contractor and the designer. User benefits are applicable to the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder. We've found that the <inaudible> needs to be a shared asset that validates each party's understanding of the project as you move along. How do we get started? Well, when we were conducting the design review - when I see we, it's us on the construction side of the business - the Interchange project was extremely complex. As I mentioned, we had 12 construction phases, all those structures, all those turning roadways and all that traffic. We were struggling with the review of such a massive project because of the complex sequencing and a mix of traffic schemes. So in order to gain a better understanding of the work, we initiated the digital model, created the digital model. What did that do for us? Well, it helped us to validate the design, the traffic schemes that were depicted and the staged construction schemes were all valid and buildable. It helped us to identify possible conflicts prior to advertising the work, and it helped us reduce risk because we could look very closely at the interfaces and dependencies between the adjacent bridge construction project with the interchange project that was being advertised. The model also was provided to the bidders for the interchange to give them a better understanding and our interpretation of the work involved in the project. Like has been described before, these major projects involve more than a thousand plan sheets and scheduling activities that might be five thousand or more activities. So any tool that can provide a better level of understanding is going to be valuable to all the project participants. So let's talk about how the model was built. We started - looking at the upper left in the slide - we started with some survey data, from which was produced some two-dimensional CAD files. We added surfaces to those to create 3D images - that's in the lower left. To the 3D image that was created, we added ground terrain through the DTM, Digital Terrain Model. We used satellite imagery to provide geospatial orientation, and we added local context imaging to give a sense of place to the model that we created, and the outcome of that was a 3D model. So, adding the fourth element, the time element, involved the introduction of a CPM schedule. So in order to accomplish this, the 3D model needed to be tied to the CPM schedule. This was done element by element, and in fact, this task had to be done twice: first with our planning schedule developed during design, and later with the contractor's CPM schedule, developed after the award of the contract. There were over five thousand schedule activities, and each schedule activities needed to be tied to a project element. How do we bring it all together? All of the various data and information sources were combined using a software product called Navisworks. Navisworks acts as a platform to house various file types, 3D geometry files and schedule files, and also allows them to communicate with one another. I should note that Navisworks is an Autodesk product. Bentley has a similar product called Navigator, and I'm told that they both work with multiple file types. So adding detail to the model. This illustration - I'm going to start at the bottom, the line on the bottom, which is the element components. On the left side you'll see the pier shown as a single component; on the right side you can see it as seven objects. So combining the two, you can either show the pier being constructed as one unit, or broken down. Up on the top, you can see a sequence of construction, and here we're using color to depict the various stages of component construction, with each color representing a different phase, from rebar to forming to stripping to a completed pier. When you pull it all together, this is the model that you see, and the link is established between the 3D geometry and time, creating a 4D simulation that shows what construction activity is taking place at a particular moment in time, where on the project site this activity is located, and what is the duration of this activity. So Michael, if you could go ahead and start the video there. This is a video of -

Michael Kay: Sure. Just give me a sec. But go ahead and keep talking while I get it up.

Mark Rolfe: All right. I just wanted to say this is a video of the actual digital model. The model itself has the ability to pan and zoom, to stop and start, and to drill down where needed. We'll see some examples of that later in the presentation. But when the video starts here, it's a high-level view of the interchange, sort of from the opposite angle we looked at it from before, with the timescale shown on the bottom - so if we get this - there we go. The timescale is moving now, and you can see various colors coming onto the screen, and across the top you can see the color scheme is shown for, in this case, different types of construction, from temporary construction to demolition to strip-and-cure activities and formwork activities. So you can see as the work progresses, various colors are showing on your screen and the timeline is shown on the bottom. So that, at a very high level, is the digital model for our program. Now I'd like to turn it over to bring in John Dunham. John is the Assistant District Engineer in charge of day-to-day operation of the program, and he will explain how digital modeling was utilized to help deliver these projects.

John Dunham: Thanks, Mark. Michael, I guess you're going to switch us back to the slide mode?

Michael Kay: Yes. It should just take a second.

John Dunham: All right. Going to use the mouse here. There we are. So, I'm going to bring you through how we used 3D and 4D modeling during the design, planning and construction phases of this program, and highlight some of the benefits. This slide we show here, it's helped validate our schedule logic. We looked at contractor's means and methods. As has been mentioned a few times, we identified clash detection and timeline identification of critical issues is really a key part of using this 3D/4D modeling. And you can see in the lower - the two slides that we have here are two traffic shifts that we have. We've had two major projects, a bridge project and an interchange project, abutting each other, so we really felt it would be beneficial to use this 3D/4D modeling throughout the program. So, one of the benefits that we certainly found was, as we discussed and planned an activity, we could put it up on a screen and look at it, and all the players would have a good common view of the work that was being looked at. That's what we mean by it levels the playing field. People aren't imagining work in the 2D world of paper. They can look at it up on the screen, everybody's looking at the same thing, it's easy to point to various areas of the world and talk about them. So we felt it really helped to reduce risk as we were planning the work. Here we have a video that's going to show the Interchange Project, as Mark had mentioned earlier - Michael, if you could queue up the video, and I'll keep talking - but we felt that if we inputted all the activities from this complex project, we could really start to take a look at how the project was being built, and I think Mark had mentioned we gave it to the bidders as well so that they could get an understanding of it. Once he starts the video, I'll show you a problem we discovered during the planning phase that really helped us out. So if we could get the video started. So what we have here is a view of the interchange. It's going a little bit slow, but we'll show elements of the work being constructed. You can see how throughout the various stages of the project, elements of the work pop up. It was kind of all over the place, and certainly tough to visualize. And you can see in green, which just popped up, which is a major component of I-95, which was a critical area of the work, we wanted to focus into when this video moves along, and it's starting to pan down to it a little bit. So what we discovered as we looked and ran the video was we found that there was substructure work that was completed after steel erection work. So obviously that's not good, we can't have that, so we went and analyzed the schedule and resequenced the work, and when we resequenced the work, we were able to determine that there was - we solved the problem. Actually, Michael, we're having some technical difficulties here. Our video's not working, so if you can just advance to the next slide and we'll go from there.

Michael Kay: Sure.

John Dunham: But the gist of what we got out of this was we found that there was a schedule flaw, and that schedule flaw, that there was substructure work completed after the steel work, and certainly not beneficial when you're trying to plan out the work. So we solved that with the 3D/4D modeling, and there's a shot right there showing the highlighted areas of where there was a problem. So once we got into construction, we used the model again to input the contractor's schedule, and when we inputted the contractor's schedule, we were able to identify additional conflicting areas. Just waiting for that to pop up right now. Michael, is it coming up? We're not seeing anything on our screen here?

Michael Kay: Sorry, which slide are you referring to?

John Dunham: Okay, we got to go back two slides, so where it says Identifying Scheduling Conflicts. There we are. Okay. So after we had looked at the planning schedule and we got contractors onboard, we inputted his schedule into the 3D/4D model. And again, we were trying to find scheduling conflicts and reduce risk. So in his schedule we found there were pile-driving activities that were concurrent with steel erection - obviously a problem - out-of-sequence steel erection; and then, in the lower left hand, you can see in green there was actually new pier construction that was supposed to be constructed prior to bridge demolition. So the 3D/4D model just helped us identify all these problems in the schedule and get them early. So whenever you're delivering major projects like this that are large and complex, anything you can see and solve early is helpful to all parties. Here again, we looked at contractor's means and methods. He had temporary shoring towers erected on top of temporary trestles that were yet to be constructed, temporary shoring towers installed prior to demolition of existing bridge. So again, we were just identifying problems early and solving them. So, and I'll note here the contractor was to really onboard with using the 3D/4D model in the beginning, but as time went on he really began to love it and insisted upon it at each meeting. So I think our contractors really started to see the benefit of it as well. Another area where we used it was on work planning. So, where we had a difficult piece of work that had to be constructed - we were building a new flyover ramp over Interstate 95 - and we wanted to plan the work out almost hour by hour, and we used the model to help us out with that.

And you'll see in the upper right-hand corner we brought in a tub girder in the center lane there. Well, the original plan showed that coming in the right-hand lane, and we found that the girder wouldn't fit through that area. So we identified a potential problem by having the model. And, again, on the lower left hand, you can see - or throughout all of the slides - the two cranes - the operators had difficulty seeing one another. We identified that early. So we said, "Okay, let's get some spotters out there." So although these pictures show it as daytime, we did this work in the middle of the night and included 20- minute stoppages of I-95. So finding these problems early potentially helped with maybe increased backups on the highway and potential downtime. So, again, another key benefit. We used it for construction safety planning. So we had a bridge that was within 18 inches of an existing building that had to be demolished. So there are hot work limits. Whenever you're flame-cutting steel beams within 35 feet of an existing building, you have to have a hot work plan, which means you have to have all your safety stakeholders in to review the plan - your firemen, police, other designers, city officials. And so we were able to use the model to show how the work was going to be performed and it helped people really understand what was going to be done by the contractor. So here we have some demolition sequencing of that bridge, the one that was within 18 inches of that building. So we went through piece by piece and were able to show how the bridge was going to be demolished and showed it to all the stakeholders. So we have another video here - we're going to give this one a shot. So Michael, see if this one will work. And this will show the demolition of that bridge, and we were able to identify utility conflicts, crane placements, all sorts of activities that really helped us in the planning of this work. All right, let it roll. And you can see in the red <inaudible> there, that was all the hot work. So we utilized that to show everyone exactly where the hot work would take place. And then we were cutting the beams, and where we were going to place them. So as we pan around a little bit, we show laydown areas for trucks, potential traffic impacts. So it was really very helpful. And you can see it moving along. This one's operating, moving a little bit better. You can see each piece being demolished. There we go. All right, you can give it back to me now, Michael.

Michael Kay: Will do. Just give me a sec. Are you seeing it there, the visualization slide?

John Dunham: Not yet, no. I've got a wait bar. Is it coming up yet?

Michael Kay: I've got you back, but there might be a lag.

John Dunham: No, I think we're okay now. So, visualization. We used the models for visualizing. We had a traffic shift, a pretty major one, interstate-to-interstate connection. You can see on the upper left-hand side the March 2014 slide. When we mapped it out, we could see that we lacked adequate signage and directional information for the traveling public. So in the right-hand slide, the August 2014, we added that orange sign, and it helps people with which exit they were supposed to be in, or if they were going to stay on mainline, and we painted some highway shields right on the pavement to help people with their direction. And then you can see in the lower portion, the October 2014 slide, that is an actual picture. So you can see it mirrors the model very well there. Again, visualization. We were able to take a look at all the elevations of all the bridges through the interchange, just gave us a picture of what it would look like when we were complete. Same thing with this slide here, with the architectural elements that were a big part in the planning phase of this project. We were able to take a look at that and see how that was going to look, and I think it helped everyone understand how that was going to be. Lastly, public information and outreach. It was definitely very helpful when we were trying to get information out to the public. There were a lot of major traffic shifts through here, excess of 140 thousand vehicles a day, so we wanted to get that information as early as we could, prior to any traffic shifts, out to the public. We used the model to do that. We found that the media oftentimes picked it up, put it on their websites. We had it our websites. We put it on <inaudible> news, which are the outreach that we use to get the information out. Detours. We used before-and-after simulations, actual traffic shift videos, which we have one of those, which will conclude the presentation here.

Michael, I think you probably got to run this one as well. This is the last one where you have to do that.

Michael Kay: Yep. Let me just pull it up.

John Dunham: So what we did was we were actually able to show a before-and-after of a traffic shift. So this is what we call TS17, and we were showing a traffic movement from mainline 95 to an interstate connection and existing ramp, and here we were before, running the car down through here. And really, the public and the media really seemed to enjoy this. There were times in the morning news where the newscast would actually be showing this to show everyone exactly how things were and how they were going to be. There were times the media would actually drive through the traffic shifts. So here we are after the traffic shift. We're running through. We kind of bent off to the right before, but now we continue on the mainline. And this also brings up that visualization that I showed earlier in that little Gore area where we had the 91 shield that was on the pavement, and that orange sign which is coming up from the background, you'll see right now. So we were able to see this actually in real-time here. So, and you can see a little steep grade, we came down through here. But this is probably one of the big benefits to using this. So all right, Michael, we're done with that. I think we can probably finish that off. All right. So with that, I'm done. I'm going to turn it over to Mark to wrap up our presentation.

Mark Rolfe: Well, just in summary, our program, like any major project, I think was very complex. The 3D and 4D digital modeling has been integral to our success thus far. The digital model provides a common view that is the basis for the collaboration of the owner, contractors, engineers and other stakeholders. It was particularly valuable when we had adjacent contractors vying for the same turf.

We use it to identify conflicts and issues and to reduce risk. We also use it, as John just illustrated, to reach out and inform the public of upcoming construction activities and traffic shifts that may impact them. It provides the transparency that fosters the public's trust and provides the community with a sense of ownership of the program. So with that, I'll turn it back to Michael for any questions.

Michael Kay: Great. Thanks a lot, gentlemen. And I just want to pull up their contact information. Oops. We may not have that. We might have lost that. So we have a few questions that came in.

Looks to be about five questions. The first one is from Dean: Has there been any cost-benefit analysis to support the decision to use CIM 3D, 4D, etcetera?

Mark Rolfe: We did not do cost-benefit analysis. Early on when we were doing the design reviews for the interchange, we were just overwhelmed with the amount of detail and how to absorb it all. I can share some cost information though. In terms of percentage of overall construction cost, we're right about 0.1 percent of the construction cost that we spent on CIM or digital modeling here for the program.

Michael Kay: Great. From Leanne - well, it's sort of a similar question: What did it cost to do the 4D modeling and simulation?

Mark Rolfe: Yeah, the percentage was about 0.1 percent. So the constructed value that we were just looking at there was about 1.5 billion dollars and we've spent about 1.6 million in digital modeling. I will say this, that the initial model was created in 2009. The technology has come a long way since then, so things that were extremely difficult five or six years I think would go much faster today.

Michael Kay: That's a great point. And from Bob in WisDOT: In the design-build scenario, who owns the model and the liability?

Mark Rolfe: These projects are design-bid-build. We haven't addressed that issue here. I will say this: For our project, we have freely shared the model, and it's sort of owned by the project. I don't know if that translates to the design-build well or not, but that's the approach we've taken to it, that we continually update it and we make it available to all the participants.

Michael Kay: From Aaron: What is the staffing impact managing the model throughout the construction phase?

Mark Rolfe: So, we've accomplished this work for the most part through our program management consultant, and I believe that the staffing level required is one person completing the 3D/4D model and another person doing the visualization videos. So two people. Obviously sometimes it's more, a lot of times it's less, but two people generally.

Michael Kay: And from Chris: Does anyone have examples where the 3D/4D modeling was a requirement set forth in an RFP on a design-build project? And that can be open to any of the presenters, or if any of the participants today do have any examples, feel free to put them in the chat box.

Mark Rolfe: In Connecticut we're just starting with design-builds, so I don't have an example.

Michael Kay: Great, and thank you, LaToya, for including Mark and John's contact information. So we'll just wait one minute to see if any other questions come in, and then we'll move on. Well, let's move on, and if we have any other questions we can answer them at the very end, but I'll turn it back over to LaToya. I'm sorry, one other question came in from Leanne: Was the conflict example from within the software or just an illustration?

Mark Rolfe: I'm sorry?

John Dunham: Is there another question you had there? Was the conflict from within the software or just - okay, so the conflict I think that we showed was actually in the CPM schedule. So as we imported it into the software we found the conflicts within our schedule, not necessarily in the software. So we were visually able to see it. So as all of the sudden the steel popped up - and it maybe didn't present well in the presentation with the videos - but all of the sudden you saw steel hanging in the air and there wasn't any substructure. So if we ran the videos through, you would have seen steel and then substructure coming up from beneath it. So obviously you can't build a project like that, and build it as you would in the model. We said, "Okay, this is wrong." We reworked the schedule and the activities, and then fixed it that way.

Michael Kay: And a follow-up: Does the software run a conflict diagnostic?

Mark Rolfe: Not that I'm aware of. Or at least in our experience. Maybe it has that capability and we just didn't use it. We saw it visually on the screen, so that's how we identified conflicts.

Michael Kay: Got it. Great. Well, with that, I'll turn it back over to LaToya to introduce our next speakers.

LaToya Johnson: Thank you, Michael, and thank you so much Mark and John. Great presentation on 3D modeling in Connecticut. So with that, we will shift to Pennsylvania, moving a little bit south of Connecticut, and we'll talk a little bit about the Pennsylvania Rapid Bridge Replacement Project. Many of you have probably heard of this project. It's a pretty innovative project, a bridge bundling project, and we thought it would be appropriate if a team from Pennsylvania DOT could come and share some of their lessons learned and best practices for doing a project as unique as this, and some of the issues that they've had to work through. So we have three presenters today from Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. First is Bryan Kendro, who is the Director of the Public Private Partnership Office at PennDOT, and he's responsible for implementing Pennsylvania's transportation P3 program, and he has a background working as a long-time aide to one of Pennsylvania's congressmen here in DC. Next we will hear from Gary Kliest, who is the project manager for the Pennsylvania P3 Rapid Bridge Replacement Project, and Gary has a background working as a Chief of Project Schedules, Specs, and Constructability for PennDOT, and for the Consultant Agreement section in PennDOT, and previously Gary also had the experience of working in the water treatment, water system business, as well as designing and managing industrial water treatment systems. And then lastly we will hear from Dean El- Baz, who is the Consultant Program Manager for the Pennsylvania Rapid Bridge Replacement Project, and before serving in his current role, Dean was involved in several other high-profile major projects, some of which I think we've even talked about during some of our previous webinars. We have LBJ I- 635 Managed Lanes Project in Dallas, as well as the Safe and Sound Bridge Project in Kansas City, Missouri, and the New Mississippi River Bridge Project in St. Louis, Missouri. So with that, I will turn I over to Pennsylvania DOT and Bryan to talk about the Pennsylvania Rapid Bridge Project.

Bryan Kendro: Thank you. Regarding the legislative authorization, there's two pieces of legislation that are kind of important here as background. Act 88 of 2012 was the P3-enabling statute, which allows us to do public-private partnership projects, a variety of modes of transportation. Essentially the requirement is that it's either a transportation-related facility or service, so it's a very broad authorization and we work on projects of varying scope and size throughout the DOT. The Rapid Bridge Replacement Project was the first major infrastructure project as part of Act 88's enabling legislation.

About a year and a half after Act 88 passed, Act 89 passed, which was a significant funding increase to the commonwealth by increasing the liquid fuels revenues that the state takes in. At the time, initially the project was going to be about 200 to 300 bridges, but with the passage of Act 89 and additional funding, we grew the scope of the project to anywhere from 550 to 650 bridges at the time of the RFQ. As far as why this project is the first P3 project, as you can see from this slide, Pennsylvania has over 6000 structurally deficient bridges throughout the commonwealth. It's an area that we don't like leading the nation in, but unfortunately we do, and this is largely due to the geography, the topography and the age of the state and a lot of the infrastructure in it, but it nevertheless is a problem we're obviously keenly aware of and have, for several years, and continue to kind of find innovative ways to deal with that problem and address the backlog. Because as you can see, as many as 300 bridges each year become structurally deficient, so staying ahead of that curve is hugely important to us. Turning to the next slide, as far as what the project is, we were looking for someone to come in to design, build, finance and more or less maintain these bridges for a period of 25 years. The contract term is actually 28 years. So they're responsible for the lifecycle, maintenance associated with each bridge once construction is complete. So we have a 3-year construction term, so as each bridge is completed, there's a 25-year maintenance requirement tied to each bridge. We had three county pilot programs where we bundled seven or eight bridges together. From those pilots, we realized pretty significant savings, especially in design, as much as 30 percent, and about 10 percent savings in construction. So I think we knew pretty definitively that by bundling as many as 558 bridges together that we would only continue to increase those savings, both public design and construction, with many of the bridges being designed similarly, similar shape, size, and it allows them to be constructed faster in the field. We anticipated a lot of local contractor and engineering involvement on this project, with one lead contractor being selected to deliver 558 bridges over the entire state. We knew that would require a lot of engagement from local bridge-builders and local design firms who understood kind of Pennsylvania and PennDOT's requirements, and then also could actually mobilize quickly and efficiently in all corners of the state to deliver on these bridges. We maintain routine maintenance, so it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to have them snowplow just the bridge, so we continue to plow these bridges as part of our normal plowing efforts. The Department also is still responsible for debris pickup. If there's an incident or emergency on the bridge, we take primary responsibility to take whatever action is necessary to make sure the bridge is safe. So if it requires us shutting it down or doing something temporarily to address a public safety issue, we do that, but then the requirements under the contract are immediately triggered for the development entity to then go take more long-term corrective action on the bridge, depending on the nature of the incident. There's handback requirements associated, both throughout the entire term of the - there's performance requirements throughout the term of the contract and then also handback requirements at the end of the contract that go to the biennial federally mandated bridge inspections that take place. The development entity will actually be inspecting these bridges annually, and as part of those annual inspections and reports to PennDOT, each of the structure elements and the bridge as a whole has to meet certain criteria. PennDOT then will audit those reports and do both some desktop-level audits as well as audits in the field to make sure that the inspection reports are consistent with what's actually happening on those bridges. Turning to the next slide, one of the things that we did to help accelerate the project was we identified a handful of bridges referred to as Early Completion Bridges. The Department advanced the right-of-way in permitting and did minimal level of effort but enough to allow them to hit the ground running in 2015. The proposal that was submitted by the development entity has them finishing 58 bridges in just the first year out of the approximately 87 bridges that we identified as early completion. We actually think that number in reality is probably going to be closer to 75 bridges. So because of the Department's efforts up front, as many as 75 bridges are going to be completed in just the first year of the project.

Had we not done any of the early work required for the Early Completion Bridges, we essentially felt we probably would have lost an entire construction season, working through the right-of-way acquisition process and environmental permitting and otherwise. The remaining eligible bridges - PennDOT provides scoping documents, but beyond that - and we also acquire the right-of-way - to manage the right-of-way acquisition process - but other than that, the responsibility solely lies on the development entity to advance those projects, and that includes submitting for NEPA. This was part of the SEP-15, or the experimentation program waiver that we got from FHWA and USDOT. On the next slide, you see just the statewide distribution of all these bridges, so you can see that it touches all four corners of the state. The Early Completion Bridges were identified in the northeastern part of the state and the southwestern part of the state. We wanted to make sure that they were regionally proximate so that some of the efficiencies that we were trying to take advantage of were realized. We were also trying to balance out where in the state the project began. I'll turn over the next slide to Gary Kliest to begin talking about some of PennDOT's responsibilities.

Gary Kliest: Thank you, Bryan. Currently right now Pennsylvania is divided up into 11 engineering districts, and with this project being a statewide project, we didn't want 11 different ways of things being controlled. So what we did is the central office basically took over the management of the project, so therefore they are a single point of contact for the development entity. With that being said, there is still some local coordination that has to occur and will occur, but for the majority of all of the project, the entire project will be managed throughout the central office. In addition to that, there are some other things and roles and responsibilities that the Department will retain for this project. With the development of the project and as things progress, if there is a need to have a bridge that needs to be swapped in or out, we're responsible for that, for the determination of what bridges can be swapped in our out, and coordinate that with the development entity. The development entity is also responsible for several project management plans and the Department takes a responsible of approval each of those plans along with the scheduling of - monitoring the schedule and ensuring that it is up to date. As Bryan did mention, this project, we were able to gain approval with - this is a special experimental project, SEP-15, in regards to the NEPA. So along with that approval of the NEPA, there comes a lot of reporting and monitoring requirements that will need to be done. So the Department will be responsible for gathering that data and reporting that data to FHWA in a timely manner. Of course we're going to have to do some auditing. We'll primarily do some risk-based auditing throughout the whole process, auditing the design process, the construction process and also during maintenance. The Department does retain, as the independent assurance, doing some random testing on not only materials but also ensuring hold points that are established throughout construction, that those hold points are being abided by, and the general coordination with the CQAF that has been assigned to this project. Along with that, we have your general contractual compliances and monitoring, and also very important is FHWA coordination. We've had some excellent partnership throughout this project regarding to that, working very well together, and regards into the development of this project and also as the project is getting off the ground. Excellent coordination in regards to approvals and just general partnering with that, and that will continue - I would say that I'd foresee that type of coordination is going to continue on. Just some of the things that the development entity is responsible for. Of course they are responsible for all the contractual commitments that they've made, but they are also responsible for following our normal manuals and operating procedures for this project. There are some things that's not applicable for this type of project and which they were used as an exception - they were exceptioned out - but as a whole, generally they have to follow our normal operating procedures and manuals. As I mentioned before, the development entity has to develop 19 plans, 19 management plans, and they're various - and each of the plans is handling they're going to handle the design, construction and maintenance of the project. Some of the plans that we have is the comprehensive environmental, and then there's quality plans - not only overall quality plan, but there's ones for design, construction and maintenance. Environmental and environmental compliance was very important for us, so what we did is we required to have the development entity employ an environmental compliance manager throughout the whole D&C stage of this, and this is particularly important because of the SEP-15, to ensure that everything is abided by and all the reporting is done correctly. And then, as Bryan mentioned, as soon as construction starts on each of the bridges, they will be responsible for the MBIS inspection for each of those bridges during the term of the agreement. Just some of the other responsibilities that they have, particularly during construction, is the development entity, they will be responsible during construction of the quality control and the quality assurance. Now, this project, we required to have an independent construction quality acceptance firm that had to be onboard - the development entity had to bring them onboard. Now, this is a QCAF firm. They will report both to the Department and also to the development entity, and they will be handling the quality acceptance for the project. As we talked about earlier, the Department will retain their independent assurance role during the random sampling, random testing and analysis, and working hand in hand with the QCAF. In addition to that, FHWA and the financial teams obviously have their roles and responsibilities, to do their independent monitoring and things of that nature. As typical for P3 projects, this project - it's nothing new that the financial team, they have their own pretty much quality control team independent of a lot of others. And with that, I will turn it over to Dean.

Dean El-Baz: Sure. Thanks, Gary. So even more so than what I look at with the design-build, a public- private partnership is kind of reliant upon the transfer of risk to the development entity. So a lot of things that the Department would typically do are shifted over to the development entity in order for them to perform the QA, the QC, typical of what the Department would do. Now, in order to ensure that the project is going according to the contract, this public-private partnership essentially has a behavioral mechanism in order to get the development entity to basically be in compliance with the contract, and so that's the noncompliance point system. Essentially it's created to incentivize the development entity to comply with their contract at all points, and really there's lots of different opportunities for the noncompliance points to be assessed, but what it really focuses on is on the kind of self-reporting and self-policing of the development entity to get out in front of things and to report and coordinate with the Department, because if they don't, then there's even more - there's more of an incentive for them to get out there and address things before they happen. So noncompliance points, the contract has a table listed with everything that they can be assessed noncompliance points for, and a vast majority of them are with respect to not following their project management plans, which they're currently in development of and almost finished with. So in each case, there exists a cure period and an interval of reoccurrence. So in most cases, before they're assessed any points, they're given an opportunity to correct the issue or whatever was identified, and that's the cure period. So that can be anywhere from a very short period to maybe a week, depending on the nature of the noncompliance.

Then there's an interval of reoccurrence, to where if they don't correct the issue during the cure period, this is basically when they're assessed additional points on top of the initial points that they were assessed. So it's kind of - basically it's an encouragement for them, if there's an issue, to basically get out there and try to fix it as much as they can, or else they will keep getting dinged for points. So each point that they have has a financial impact, and once they lost it it's gone forever; it's not like they can get it back. So out of their availability payment or milestone payments, these noncompliance points, if they build up, they're basically leaving money on the table. So when things are happening, they really have the incentive to correct them very quickly or basically lose out. Now, granted, we don't anticipate this ever happening, but if they get a certain number - encroach upon a certain number of points, that can basically lead to default of the development entity. So hopefully we don't ever want to get there, but that sort of language and flexibility for the Department is built into the contract. Another sort of kind of incentive, or I guess disincentive, for the contractor - essentially there is kind of a liquidated damages situation, where for unavailability events - so calendar kind of restrictions - you can't close bridges during a school season, things like that, or detours - we have a limited number of days which they can detour a bridge, depending on the features of it - 75-day, 110-day I think is the maximum - and then lane closures. So essentially we have a minimum number of lanes that they're required to keep open, and if they don't do that, then again they get kind of these liquidated damages assessed to them as well. So in the next slide we'll talk about just the handback. So the design and construction phase, it's only anticipated - I think they're anticipating on being complete by December 31, 2017. At the final acceptance of each individual bridge, the Department really takes over the maintenance of kind of some of these typical items assigned - the delineator line painting, vegetation, etcetera. And so there are two cases for what the development entity is handing back to the Department. So there's what's referred to as Early Handback, so you have seeding and trees and all the growth established after one year. So that's kind of typical, where you have your warranty of vegetation along the right-of-way or whatever the contractor is doing. Then additionally you have flexible pavements. So, for example, on the approaches or maybe even on top of the structure - is going to be handed back in five years, and when it's handed back it must meet the five-year warranty conditions. So the Department has obviously standard publications for addressing the severity of cracking or other undesirable material performance that they need to follow during that five-year warranty period. And so when they hand it back, if it doesn't meet what the requirements are, they have to go and fix it before they hand it back. So the second condition there is the handback at the end of the term. So after the 28 years, as Bryan mentioned earlier, they're really required to maintain a minimum MBIS condition rating of 7 throughout the term, so that's what it must be when they hand it back. Well, there's a little disclaimer there where it's got to be in MBIS Condition 7 for 98 percent of all the bridges at the end of the term, and then a condition rating of 6 for the remainder of the 2 percent. So that's just a little bit of flexibility in there, and that was really built in there more for just flexibility.

Bryan Kendro: Maybe touching on that issue, because that is something unique to this project, this idea that, for instance, substantial completion of the project is actually 99 percent of the bridges; 98 percent of the bridges have to be at a certain level of handback. A lot of that is driven by the risk factors associated with the financial model and what the credit rating agencies will tolerate, because payments are associated with completion and reaching certain benchmarks with the project. The idea that one out of 558 bridges could hold up a substantial payment was going to be a problem with the credit rating agencies and investors looking at this project and the relative risk. So one of the things that we did is come up with this idea that substantial completion is actually less than 100 percent of the bridges.

There's a long-stop substantial completion deadline which does require completion of 100 percent of the bridges. But again, it just provides some relief from a financing perspective that was important to get kind of the most - to try to get good interest rates and good pricing when we went to financial close. So that's why - you might ask, "Why are you accepting less than 100 percent in some of these cases?" And most of that is because it is a P3 project and our payments are tied to performance. On the next slide, in terms of FHWA coordination, USDOT granted a private activity bond allocation of up to 1.2 billion dollars for this project. We utilized approximately 724 million of the 1.2 billion dollars that was allocated, which I believe makes it the largest PABS allocation in issuance in the history of the program, so that was very important to bringing down the borrowing cost and the interest cost associated with the project. Just to put it in perspective, the weighted average cost of capital was about 4.5 percent, so very competitive to other financial products that are available, especially municipal bonds and others that typically are deployed by DOTs. We talked already I think about the special experimental project, SEP-15, with regards to responsibility of NEPA on the part of the development entity. We also had to coordinate the RFP process with FHWA and get their concurrence with the RFP documents prior to releasing them to the four shortlisted teams. There was no negotiation after award. The RFP was essentially a binding contract at that point that each of the four teams, by submitting a proposal, agreed to all the terms and conditions of part of that RFP. So, again, it's important that everyone was comfortable with all that before receiving proposals. Going on to the schedule, we issued an RFQ in December of 2013, shortlisted teams in the first quarter of 2014. We concluded the procurement process and received proposals at the end of the September, on September 29, and we awarded the contract at the end of October. We achieved commercial close on January 9 of this year. Notice to Proceed 1 has been issued on January 30, and we also have achieved financial close on March 18, so the procurement part of the process has been fully completed in just over a year, which I think was a very aggressive schedule that we were able to keep, and now we're fully into the project delivery phase of the project. The next slide essentially just describes the timeline that I talked about. It also discusses a little bit the desire to complete construction early, some of the early handback tasks that will occur, as well as the tasks at handback, and also the desire for a useful life tied to each of these bridges. The team that was ultimately selected was Plenary Walsh Keystone Partners. The lead engineering firm is HDR. The CJV is Walsh & Granite. So Plenary and Walsh are the equity investors and the special purpose company created for the purpose of the project, so they take the construction-related risks and the long-term performance-related risks associated with the bridges. Walsh & Granite are responsible for the design and construction portion of the project. The lead maintenance firm is Walsh Infrastructure Management, which is a subsidiary of Walsh; and the construction quality acceptance firm is TRC, which, again, reports to directly to PennDOT as well as to Plenary and Walsh, the equity members associated with the project. Some of the things that were different as far as this project versus our traditional program, this was a best value selection. We don't have design-build best value authority in the commonwealth, so the only way we can do a design-build best value project is as a P3 project. We had as many as 36 one-on-one meetings with each of the four teams, about nine meetings per team, to discuss various elements of the contract and receive comments and feedback. This was very important for a project that's a first of its kind. There wasn't another contractor or project that we could just pull off the shelf and refer to, especially in a P3 context. So receiving those comments and feedback throughout the process allowed to, like I say, get a document that ultimately all for proposers could bid on and be held to. We also included alternative technical concepts throughout as part of the process. We added a two-stage ATC process where they were allowed to bring in high-level, kind of conceptual ATCs to get an early temperature on our level of interest in those ATCs, which we think helped to streamline the ATC process and allow the four teams to focus on ones that truly brought savings and value to the department and that were ones that we were reasonably interested in considering, not ones that simply were nonstarters. Gary, you may want to take the second half of the slide here.

Gary Kliest: I'm sorry. In regards to the design reviews, this is a little bit different in regards to the design reviews that we did with our typical projects. Because of this type of project - and we'll talk about this a little bit later in regarding to the standardization of this - for the design reviews, we're primarily taking an owner's perspective review of the designs, and with that we're checking for basically contractual compliance and whether or not they followed our typical policies and procedures in the manuals. Did they follow our manuals, and take an owner's perspective view with the contractual compliance? Construction involvement - we've already talked about in regards to the Department is - as opposed to our typical project, where we would have our inspectors out there, we have a QCAF firm out there doing a lot of the inspection. And there again, the Department is primarily taking a different role in regards to that and doing the independent assurance of that. One of the things that the development entities that's different in regards to this and is something that was - it was kind of hard for - not hard, but one of the challenges that we had to overtake was there is the handback and there's the handback responsibilities, and the development entity will be responsible for 25 years of these structures, each of the structures. So if there is a problem with that structure, caused either through the design or construction phases, they will be responsible for repairing that and fixing it and making it right, and whenever they do that, they have to ensure that the handback requirements and also that the useful life of that project, of each of those structures, is retained, and it has to be the useful life that we would typically have for each of the structures that we had within our normal program. Dean talked about the noncompliance routine. Now, for this project it's kind of different. There's a different payment mechanism for this project than we would typically do for a normal project. A lot of our normal projects, for design-bid-build or design-build projects, is you get paid by quantities or things of that nature. That is not the case within this project. There are three basic payment mechanisms for this project. There is a mobilization payment of 15 million dollars, then there's a milestone payment which they get payments - they have to prove that they spent X amount of money, and on defined time intervals throughout the contract they're allowed to invoice us up to a certain stimulated amount for the milestone payments. But this is an availability payment type P3 project. As the bridges come back into service, they will get credit for that bridge, meaning that if in January you have 100 bridges that are back in service, you get paid for those 100 bridges. But let's just say you complete 25 of them. Well, in February, you'll get availability payments for the 125 now, and those will slowly increase until we reach the 558 of all of the availability payments. Availability payments do not start until at least 50 bridges are complete. So you can see that there would be some impetus for them to get those underway as early as possible. The next slide basically gives us just a basic understanding of what type of projects that we have for this. You can see that there's a lot of integral abutments and there's a good handful of box culverts in regarding to that. With that being said, we wanted to throw them some curveballs. We didn't give them all just the easy bridges. There are a couple curveballs in there dealing with some unique possibilities, because one of the challenges we want for this project is the lessons learned. We really want to find out things and learn a lot from this project; then we can roll that into our normal program. It's a high goal in regards to that for me, to be able to capture all those lessons learned and ensure that we do implement them into our normal program. One of the things that we do have going on right now that is kind of different from ours is what we call the Technical Working Group. Every week we have several technical working groups that meet, like I said, on a weekly basis. We have a general technical call, which everybody comes in. But then, in addition to that, we have individual breakout sections. We have right-of-way breakout sections that meet every week. We have utilities that meet every week. In addition to that, we also have a design over-the-shoulder meeting every week, which is a four-hour meeting every week, and what that is, is everybody sits at the table, all the necessary parties sit down, and you just bang out situations. So you have the necessary people there. You have the right- of-way people there, you have the H&H people there - all the people that are pertaining to that project, or the challenge that is being discussed at the time - you get all the players at the table and you talk it out and you work it out, and you move on. It's like a very expeditious fashion of moving through the project. One of the things that this project does have is currently right now we have about 11 standard designs in which we're working with the development entity and working with FHWA to get those approved. Once we get those standard designs approved, here again that'll expedite the design review process to say, "Okay, yes they did use a standard design. That's already approved." The only thing you really have to look at is how did they tweak it, what did they change, and that has to be spelled out very clearly in regarding to that, so whenever you're reviewing that you look at the tweaks to say, "Okay, they used this standard design. Okay, they tweaked it this way. I'm very comfortable with that." In addition to these 11, we're starting to work on six more standard designs that are in the process. So as it stands right now, the team has proposed somewhere around 17 to 20 standard designs that they plan on using for this project. One of the benefits of this team, and which the development entity has said they are going to do, is they're going to do central procurement for this. They're going to use the buying power of 558 bridges to their advantages. So they're going to do central procurement for things such as their beams. They're going to do central procurement for things, in addition to that, for rebar. And you can see how the price of the impact of that quantity is definitely going to be a benefit to the Department. In addition to that is there's going to be - in addition to the economy of scale - is also the efficiencies regarding to that. Once you coordinate that and you set the systems up, they should be able to manufacture and bang out things in a very expeditious fashion, because it's very efficient that - once you get everything all set - they're not going from this bridge type to this beam type to this. It's just - and you get into a widget-making process and all you have to do is ensure the quality assurance in regarding to that. So that's very key. I think we're seeing the economy of scale is a very benefit for this type of project. And just lastly, the last slide, is just a slide on the - that's the website for this project, and a lot of information, lot of good information, regarding to that. You can use that website to relay information for the NEPA process, public meetings, things of that nature. The development entity has said that they're going to use some subcontracting, so they use that information not only for attracting subcontractors, but also pointing out information in regards to the projects. Each of the bridges on this website has its own little website in regards to it that gives it a status, a background, some pertinent information for that. So if Aunt Mary is looking to get some information about her particular bridge that's being constructed right down the street, she can go in there, click on that bridge, and it'll give her what's going on with that bridge and some information that she may be interested in. With that, I know that the time's a little bit over here. I'll turn it over to Mike.

Michael Kay: Great, I'll take it. Thank you so much, gentlemen. We have about 10 minutes left. I want to be sure to give their contact information. I'll ask LaToya: LaToya, do you want to go through these announcements and then, time permitting, take a few questions for the folks in Pennsylvania, or do you want to take some questions first?

LaToya Johnson: Let's just take some questions first, Michael, as long as I have a couple minutes at the end to wrap up.

Michael Kay: Okay, that sounds good. So we'll see if we can get through these reasonably quickly. I see about six of them. First, our friends at CDM Smith responding to the question previously about examples, mention that TxDOT has a requirement for developers to produce 3D renderings, just snapshots at selected locations in the RFP process for design-build projects. And then I see about six questions for PennDOT, first from Dean: Please describe the billing review process.

Gary Kliest: That's the payment mechanism in which we talked about before, where on a monthly basis they will see availability payments for each of the bridges that they put back into service, and eventually, as all 558 bridges will come open to service, they'll be able to bill for that, all 558. So each month you'll get your availability payments minus any noncompliance points that will be taken off each of the invoices for noncompliance. As that is closed out, then that is taken off the availability payment for that particular month.

Bryan Kendro: And we do have some visibility into costs associated with various designs and some of the elements and stuff like that, but I think the biggest thing to keep in mind is this is essentially a fixed price, lump sum contract. So everything associated with completing these 558 bridges is essentially part of their proposal, to the extent that there's a small universe of what we refer to as compensation events, where if, for instance, the Department retains the right-of-way responsibility. If we're late in providing them the right-of-way, that would be considered a compensation event if they could come to us and demonstrate that there was a cost associated with that delay. But only in limited circumstances such as that are we getting into any specific cost-based discussions. Other instances might be if there's a desire for a pedestrian or a sidewalk on a bridge where we otherwise didn't have it as part of the requirements in the proposal, we do have the ability to go to the team and say, "You know, we want a sidewalk added to that bridge," and we'll then negotiate the price of that sidewalk for inclusion on the structure. But beyond that, I mean, their own internal billing really isn't of concern to us because, like I said, the availability payment that they're getting and the milestone payments are maximum payments that they're going to receive under the contract.

Michael Kay: All right, next from Leanne: Is the QCAF contract direct with PennDOT?

Bryan Kendro: The CQAF contract is - it's a dual reporting responsibility, but it's hired by Plenary, which is the majority equity investor in the people, with 80 percent equity, which is kind of a traditional structure in a P3 contract for an independent kind of assurance quality.

Michael Kay: Next, from Colorado, the HPTE there: Does PennDOT have an oversight verification testing program for this project?

Gary Kliest: Yes, we do. We do have an oversight project. They're either going to use our certified labs, or we will certify the labs in which they plan on using, and within the testing they have to use our standard testing procedures and our standard testing forms, just like we would for our typical projects.

Michael Kay: A couple more here from Arian in Arizona: How are points used if a noncompliance item is something that cannot be cured, such as a spill into a waterway?

Bryan Kendro: Not all the terms and conditions are translated into noncompliance points. So in that case, it's really just the contract and the contract puts the responsibility of any contamination or hazardous materials that they cause as part of the construction process - they are wholly responsible for any costs associated with that. So if there were to be a spill, whatever, whatever the mitigation costs and cleanup costs and anything that might be required would be fully borne by the contractor. We only provide protection for unforeseen or reasonably unknown hazardous material. So if they get out there and find something that none of us knew was out there, the Department retains that risk. But to the extent that they cause anything like that, they're responsible. And like I said, it's not necessarily something that's part of the noncompliance regime, but it's very much in the contract.

Michael Kay: Thanks. And from Dean: Do you include civil rights, such as DBE and EEO, noncompliance in the damages, noncompliance points issued?

Dean El-Baz: Yeah, there are individual noncompliance point categories for DBE and Equal Opportunity compliance. So yes, there is that in the contract.

Michael Kay: Great, thanks. From Leanne: What restrictions, if any, relate to corridor traffic impacts for working on multiple structures?

Gary Kliest: Sure. There are - during the contract, each of the bridge has to have its own traffic control plan, and those plans will be reviewed in central office and also, in addition to that, they have to be reviewed and they will be approved within the districts. So the districts will know if that traffic control plan for that particular structure or structures in the area are impacting any of our normal programs. So that has to be coordinated very much so. In addition to that, the development entity is responsible for all coordination with third-parties of any event of things of that nature that are occurring throughout that structure. For example, we have the Pocono Races here. In certain periods of time, those structures in those particular times cannot be closed. So all this has either been spelled out in the contract or they have to do that with coordination for each of the bridges.

Michael Kay: Last but not least, from Alfeo: What is the financial value of a noncompliance point?

Dean El-Baz: So there is - one in the design and construction, a noncompliance point, is worth 3000 dollars; in the maintenance phase it's 2000 dollars per point.

Michael Kay: All right, back to you, LaToya.

LaToya Johnson: All right, thank you Michael, and thank you so much Pennsylvania DOT - Bryan, Gary and Dean. Great presentation, great overview about the project. With that, I just wanted to wrap up really quickly. I had a couple of announcements that I thought would be of interest to our audience. One, that yearly Federal Highway goes in and we confirm and update our number of major projects throughout the country, and we just recently updated this material. And so our updated number of active major projects - and these are projects that have completed environmental documents and have moved into the major project requirements, such as the financial plan <inaudible>, we have 114 active major projects. So you can kind of see the spread of where these projects are throughout the country - California and Texas, no surprise, leading the way. But Pennsylvania is there, as is Connecticut and Wisconsin. And then as far as future major projects - and these are projects that are still in the early environmental phases or planning phases - you can see the spread of projects. And the green are states that don't currently have active major projects, but are anticipated in the near future that they will potentially have a major project. So just FYI information. And then a follow-up to a webinar that we did back in February, I just wanted to let everyone know that the updated financial plan guidance was issued in December, and there are several resources on our website, including the guidance, examples, and the federal register notice, as well as the recorded webinar that we did in February. If you missed that, that is available on our website to download. So feel free to visit the website and look at any of that information and give us a call if you have any questions or comments. And then lastly, I just wanted to announce that our next joint DOT-Federal Highway webinar is tentatively scheduled for October. So if you have any suggestions for presentations or you would like to do a presentation, or if you would like to request that someone does a presentation, please contact me and we'll try to get them on that agenda. And then for Federal Highway, our next quarterly webinar, internal webinar, will be on Tuesday, August 4. So with that, we will wrap up. Again, I want to say thank you to all of our presenters. Great presentations. And for the audience, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to them. You heard a wealth of knowledge and information today, and as we close, if you could just take a moment to answer four quick poll questions just to give us some feedback as we continue to do this in the future. So again, thank you everyone, and have a wonderful afternoon.

Jim Sinnette: Thank you, LaToya.

Operator: That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation and for using AT&T.