From a distance, Falcon Ridge Elementary looks like a beautiful school.

Dark metallic shingles line parts of the second story and handcrafted stonework covers part of the entrance. Visitors wind their way around a large pond and through thick patches of trees to get to the brick building.

On the inside, however, cracks have begun to appear. Literally.

Ceiling tiles have sagged above students’ heads. One child fell into a hole on the second floor that had been patched over with a thin layer of concrete and insulation wrapped in a plastic tarp. Another was nearly struck by seven solid-maple planks that tumbled 40-feet from near the ceiling into the building’s commons. Cracks and gaps have formed in the gymnasium’s wooden floor, and a sneeze guard in the cafeteria is said to have begun shedding shards of glass into the food below.

The school is now the focal point of a multi-million dollar lawsuit and increasingly contentious claims between a construction management firm, a bond program manager and the 3,500-student Huffman ISD.

Officials with Paradigm Construction LLC say the school district stopped paying the company after June, even though it took until August to substantially complete the school following delays spurred by Hurricane Harvey’s deluge and alleged interference from a firm selected to manage Huffman ISD’s bond program. They claim that as they worked seven days a week to get the building ready for the first day of school, Huffman’s bond manager inserted new subcontractors into the project who tinkered with already finished features and made it difficult for Paradigm’s unpaid subcontractors to finish their work.

Huffman ISD and Bond Program Management Services, in turn, say their contract allowed them to stop payments to Paradigm after it became apparent the construction would not be finished by the originally agreed upon substantial completion date of July 19, and that the work was “non-conforming” and did not meet standards. BPMS officials say Paradigm, architectural firm Huckabee & Associates and subcontractors did little to address issues, producing a building so riddled with problems it has led to a student’s injury.

Teachers had to help assemble furniture and vacuum construction debris hours before they welcomed students to the school for an open house, and the district had to pay $3,000 a day for two weeks to bring in catered lunches because the school’s kitchen was inoperable.

Caught in the middle of the legal battle and escalating war of words are 748 students and dozens of teachers trying to make do with doors that do not close and classrooms with incomplete walls, as well as subcontractors who don’t know when, or if, they will be paid for work they did, putting some in jeopardy of going out of business.

Courtney Lively, who teaches physical education at Falcon Ridge, said she finds new issues with the building daily. The bathrooms attached to the gym only became operational on Dec. 13, and those rooms still lack tile flooring.

“The kids don’t know all the problems, but the teachers are stressed trying to keep it all together,” she said.

A contract without a company

Falcon Ridge Elementary was paid for through a $44.1 million bond issue approved by 66 percent of Huffman ISD’s voters in May 2016. More than $29 million of that was budgeted for the new elementary school.

A couple of weeks later, Tom Trial’s phone rang.

The Montgomery County resident was fishing in the Atlantic Ocean, enjoying retirement after leaving his job as co-director of Huckabee & Associate’s Houston office. From Huffman, district officials told him they were impressed with his and Huckabee’s work on other school projects and asked if he would take a job overseeing projects associated with the bond.

Trial said he had little interest joining the district as an employee but accepted an offer to work as a third-party contractor. He got together with two former colleagues, including the Huckabee architect who had already designed Huffman ISD’s new elementary school, and his 26-year-old son Cameron to do the job.

Huffman ISD’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously, with one trustee absent, to hire Trial’s new Bond Program Management Services on Aug. 1, 2016, and Superintendent Benny Soileau signed a contract with Trial on Aug. 15. The contract stipulated BPMS be paid a $150,000 the day the contract was signed, between 1.5 percent and 2 percent of the bond’s $44.1 million value and hourly wages ranging from $60 to $250 for BPMS employees.

However, records filed with Texas’ Secretary of State show BPMS was not registered as a business until Nov. 15, 2016, three months after the superintendent signed a contract and the district began paying the firm. The district and its attorneys first learned of the late registration when questioned by a Chronicle reporter earlier this month.

Trial said that was the result re-registering the business as a LLC on the advice of his accountant.

“It’s not that we were trying to do anything funny there,” Trial said.

Dustin Hall, president of the Paradigm Construction, said the mistake is symptomatic of broader problems with Huffman ISD and BPMS that stymied the school’s creation.

“How did these guys get selected to manage a $44 million bond program with no prior program-management experience, with a company that didn’t even exist at the time the $1 million contract was awarded to them with a $150,000 down payment?” Hall asked. “How does that happen?”

In a statement, Huffman ISD spokeswoman Shirley Dupree said BPMS’ selection was based on Trial’s work with the district’s architect on previous construction projects.

“The district had gained confidence in Mr. Trial’s expertise and effectiveness and believed his past success would translate well on future projects managed by his company,” Dupree wrote.

Delays and disruptions

Falcon Ridge was the biggest project undertaken by Paradigm since it formed in 2013. The firm and is subcontractors have experience building schools, including South Houston Early College High School and Sam Rayburn Early College High in Pasadena ISD, as well as three private parochial schools. Other projects include churches, smaller businesses and Missouri City’s soon-to-be-completed library.

Several months after construction on Falcon Ridge began in the summer of 2017, crews were compacting soil and laying rebar to prepare for pouring the school’s concrete slab. Then, it rained. Hurricane Harvey poured more than 30 inches of rain in the area just east of Lake Houston, leaving the construction site inaccessible for days and washing away at least seven-days’ worth of work, according to Hall. Deluges continued intermittently into September, making the area a soggy mess.

Hall said crews pushed ahead, but the storm and subsequent rains were not the only thing slowing the project’s progress. Current and former Paradigm employees who worked on Falcon Ridge told the Houston Chronicle that Trial would quibble over routine expenses, overrule architects about design decisions, create new projects and take months to approve actions that typically are authorized in days.

“That normal process was completely disrupted by BPMS,” Hall said. “We had submittals that would take over 100 days to be processed, submittals that should have taken seven days to be processed.”

Trial, however, said the source of Paradigm’s frustration was his pushback on unnecessary expenses, as well as his reminders that the contractor needed to get the project’s timeline back on track.

“Architects and contractors work school districts, and I was there to keep that from happening to Huffman ISD,” Trial said. “We’re there to look after the school district to make sure they get what they paid for.”

Trial and Hall said their weekly meetings would last hours longer than expected and often were unproductive. Frustrations reached a crescendo on Feb. 23, 2018.

In a letter sent to Huffman ISD’s school board trustees and Soileau, attorneys representing Huckabee & Associates and Paradigm Construction wrote that Trial “screamed at and physically assaulted” the lead architect on the job. Employees told Hall that Trial bellowed expletives and insults at the architect and “physically threw him out of the office” in front of Paradigm and other Huckabee employees. The attorneys asked that Trial be taken off the project.

Trial denied the allegations. Huffman ISD officials said they investigated the incident, but found no evidence of wrongdoing, and Trial stayed.

“It was an effort to try to get us removed from the job because we were making a very detailed inspection of the work that was being performed,” Trial said. “I think they felt it was more beneficial for us to be gone so they could have more freedom.”

Missed payments, shoddy work

As days ticked closer to the original July 19 substantial completion date for Falcon Ridge Elementary, it became apparent to Paradigm and BPMS that it would take longer to finish the building. Hall said Paradigm asked Huffman ISD for a seven-day timeline extension citing Hurricane Harvey, which the district denied, saying the request was made later than stipulated by the contract.

At the end of June, Paradigm officials said the district stopped paying the company for its work, leaving it unable to pay its subcontractors. Hall said he sent email after email to the district and BPMS about payment, but that his firm never saw another check.

“Our crews were working around the clock, seven days a week trying to get the facility ready and not being paid for it,” Hall said.

Some subcontractors stopped showing up for work. An elevator company threatened to shut down the elevators until Hall paid them out of his own pocket. The fire alarm company refused to come out to site to finish its work, which would have caused the campus to fail its inspections. The district and BPMS eventually paid the fire alarm company but no other subcontractors.

Others, including Carol MacNeil, stayed and worked.

The last payment her company, Genesis Cabling Solutions, received in June was 40 percent less than expected, but she hoped the district would make it up in its next payment. Even though another check did not materialize, she and her husband worked nights and weekends for about eight more weeks making sure fiber optic cables were connected properly, wireless internet was working and the infrastructure for the school’s communications systems was ready.

In all, she said her company lost $90,000 on the project. It also marked the first time a client refused to pay for services. Now, MacNeil said, she has taken out loans and is trying double her credit line to keep the business going.

“They can literally put some of these businesses out of business if they don’t pay us,” MacNeil said. “If you have an issue with one subcontractor, deal with that one. Why are you holding everyone’s money and trying to create problems?”

Paradigm sued Huffman ISD in September, saying its subcontractors are owed more than $4.9 million for work they completed. That does not include nearly $1 million the company says it is owed for delays caused by the district. In all, Hall said the district failed to pay for about 25 percent of the school.

Trial and district officials say they were within their contractual rights to stop payment when it appeared the project would not be finished on time and that some of the work looked as if it would need to be redone.

The case is on hold in the courts while Paradigm and Huffman ISD await mediation scheduled for February.

Huffman ISD officials say they are investigating their own claims against Paradigm and is not involved with any agreements between the construction firm and its subcontractors.

"The district believes that if the work had been performed on time and in a non-defective manner, the district would not have been forced to withhold payments," the district said in a statement. "The district has a responsibility to ensure this taxpayer-funded construction project is finished correctly."

In December, Paradigm also filed a lawsuit against BPMS and Trial, alleging Trial and his firm made false statements about Paradigm’s work to Huffman ISD and caused delays to the project. Trial denies those allegations.

As Paradigm’s subcontractors went unpaid, and the project seemed to get further behind, Trial said he brought in reinforcements to finish the school by the time students were scheduled to arrive on Aug. 27.

Trial said the school would not have opened if he did not bring in the additional workers, but Hall said the new subcontractors created new problems. For example, he said, the new crews did not communicate with subcontractors who started the work, leaving them unaware of specifics needed to complete projects.

“Scopes of work that were almost finished were being done by other crews, and work that was already finished was being altered by other crews,” Hall said. “It was a nightmare.”

Trial, however, blamed the problems on Paradigm and its subcontractors. Wood for the gyms floors, for example, was stored in a large room with no air-conditioning and swelled in the damp environment weeks before Trial brought in other workers. Now that the wood has been installed in a climate-controlled building, the planks have begun to shrink, creating cracks and gaps. Hall said the floor was designed to have some gaps between planks for a cushion installed underneath, and that his firm got a letter from the floor manufacturer saying it was fine to store them in the space.

Still, the delayed timeline caused a situation in which multiple projects needed to be finished all at once. That inevitably creates problems, Trial said.

Those problems presented themselves as soon as students stepped foot on campus, including an instance, Trial said, when a small child slipped through a gap in the railing surrounding a second-story outdoor learning area and stood, unprotected, on a concrete ledge.

In another incident, a student touring the school’s second story stepped on a poorly patched piece of flooring, which gave way as the student’s leg fell through the floor. Trial said someone had filled a mistakenly drilled hole in the floor with insulation and broken bits of concrete, held together with piece of plastic tarp and covered with a patch of spare carpeting.

Trial blamed the incidents on Paradigm and its subcontractors. Hall said if Paradigm’s subcontractors been paid through the summer, and had the district given the firm an opportunity to fix the alleged problems, the building would have been ready and in much better shape by the time school started.

Meanwhile, Falcon Ridge’s students and teachers are stuck.

Lively, the physical education teacher, recently stood in the school’s gymnasium and pointed to a row of four-foot-tall toy volleyball nets that stood between the gym and the cafeteria. The plastic and mesh are the only barriers between the two spaces because a moveable wall meant to separate the two was not installed properly and cannot be closed.

“In a few minutes, I’ll have 60 kids in here and will have to compete with the sound of a cafeteria. We’ve had balls fly over there,” Lively said. “But we can’t put teaching on hold to fix things.”

shelby.webb@chron.com

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