The Long Beach PPP Courthouse Contract

Let me commence the picking apart. If you’re an IT professional or manager in Long Beach you’re going to need to read and understand this and commence mitigation so you’ll be able to move in.

According to this documentation, the Long Beach courthouse was designed and built using a document that was obsolete the day it was published. I know because I published what is known as the JINA amendment to chapter 17 of the 2006 of the Trial Court Facilities Standards which would later be incorporated into the 2010 trial court facilities standards.

OCCM wrote these 2006 standards and sent them downstairs for the IT department to amend or correct. As a result of inter-divisional disputes, the IT management refused to respond to review requests. Sowhat was written in chapter 17 of the 2006 standards is unusable by any entity, much less any court. In case you need an example, the 2006 standards tell the designer/builder to use category 5 wiring. The last JINA amendment makes that a very capable POE requirement of category 6A.

Elsewhere in this document it spells out that security cameras should have a single cable powering them. Now if you follow chapter 17 and try to run a couple of POE injected amps at 24 volts over cat5 wiring, the wiring will melt, the injectors will pop a fuse on the POE injectors and POE and the camera will be lost.

Oddly, the documents make no reference to updated IT standards but does make reference to updated security standards written by Chris Hoover, their former security electronics ace. Security standards that require POE injectors to power the security camera wiring. This is a large building. It should have IDF’s on either side of every floor so that the runs between the POE injectors and the cameras aren’t too long. Any designer worth their salt knows that the definitions written in chapter 17 of the trial court facilities standards are unusable. Mr. Ham knows that most of the 2006 TCFS was so poorly written that they resulted in a flurry of change orders on every project. Especially in chapter 17 that defines the IT standards.

So what are you getting?

I could not tell you because Clifford is the lone ranger. Only he reviews his own engineering documentation. He does not send it on to in-house experts to review and comment. He does not send it out to the courts to review and comment. You will get exactly what Mr. Ham believes you should get. In the case of Santa Ana’s courthouse, this meant that the racks were underpowered with an obsolete electrical buss bar that only supplied 220 volts. Racks are supposed to have 30 amps each, not 50 amps total for the whole server room. Mountains needed to be moved at the last minute and again, a flurry of change orders that Mr. Ham would not approve needed to be executed just so 4DCA could move in to Santa Ana. These approvals needed to shoot over his head partly because he refused to approve change orders but mainly because he was touring europe in the weeks before the courthouse was to be delivered to the customer, leaving a poor AOC inspector to do the grunt work of delivering the building and leaving me to steal from everywhere and everyone to get the server rooms and IDF’s ready because no purchase order could be processed that fast.

The moral of this story?

Доверяй, но проверяй

Trust, but verify.

Last minute surprises on a structure this large are unworkable and will take months to address. This isn’t a tiny appellate courthouse. This is ten times larger.