Last night at Kenny’s viewing at the funeral home a good Ol Boy reminded me something. Let me start from the beginning to tell you the whole story from start to finish.
I went out to Lakeway in the late 1970s and bid on a project. When I prepared the bid it came out to somewhere around $325,000. I called my bonding company and told them that the bid was going to exceed the amount I originally told them. At that time they were limiting me to a maximum size job of $300,000.
I couldn’t convince them to raise my limit but I wanted to bid that project. So out of desperation I made the decision to do what I had to. I filled that bid out and made it some bit over $299,000.
I got out there to the bid opening and ended up being the low bidder, but only by about $5,000.
The Lakeway MUD (Municipal Utility District) and I entered into a contract and a few days later I showed up for a preconstruction conference. Some Lakeway Company employees were there that morning. They had been dragging their feet getting lots developed and were coming under fire by HUD (Housing and Urban Development) for selling those lots and not delivering the finished product.
The Lakeway Company was in charge of excavating, rough cutting, the streets prior to utilities being installed. That’s just how the sequence works. Then after the pipes all go in the ground, Lakeway Company would come in and finish building the streets.
The biggest hang up was they hired a local man to do their street work and he wasn’t very fast. In fact he was as slow as molasses. Old Man Tom Johnson was as good as they came, but almost every machine he owned was pre-World War 2 age stuff and his workforce fit the age of the machinery. And his prices were about two decades behind the times as well.
One of the Lakeway head muckety-mucks informed Eddy, the MUD Manager that it may be several months before they would have that section ready to turnover to us.
Eddy said “Mr. Lewis how much do you need to cover your daily expenses while you are sitting and waiting for the rough cut to be done”.
I got out my pencil and paper and scribbled on it a minute or so and told the room full of people that I’d would need something like $3,250 per day.
Eddy looked at the Lakeway people and said, I am going to authorize Mr. Lewis to bring his men and equipment onsite and you will need to write him a check to cover that amount every week.
Things got really uncomfortable there for a few minutes, when I said “well how about you pay us to do the street work, since we’ll just be sitting there doing nothing”.
In no time at all we worked out terms for us to do the street work. They were so pleased with our progress that they continued to hire us to build their streets. Of course they still let Mr. Johnson work at his pace on something that didn’t have a critical timeframe.
Over the next few years we did something like 13 sections of subdivision for them and they got caught up and out of trouble with the HUD folks. We only got a few of the other MUD projects, because they had to be competitively bid.
Now here is where it gets good and back to more of a Burnet County story. Kenny was running cattle up at Smithwick and Shovel Mountain and came up often to check on them. He would run across an old boy at Paleface or Hollingsworth’s Corner and visit. This feller was pushing brush, building stock tanks and pasture roads up around there.
One particular afternoon he told Kenny he would sure like to get more into the “big time of the construction in Austin and what would it take for him to break into that part of it” ?
Kenny came back and told me that if we needed some help on a project that he knew where we could get it. I leaned on Lakeway Company to let us have more work, which they gladly obliged.
Next thing we knew that Ol Spicewood Country Boy was down in Lakeway and Austin doing work and ain’t never looked back.
Dang it was nice seeing Ned Ross last night and talking over all those times.
In the words of Paul Harvey “And Now You Know The Rest Of The Story”.
This is a companion story to this one above. This incident happened on that first project we did for The Lakeway Company.
Angora Chronicles 