Willie Shen broke asphalt on Elon Musk’s Music City Loop project this summer. His crew of seven men was for months the sole excavator, fabricator and dump trucking company on the Boring Company’s proposed tunnel through Nashville.
Then came Monday night, when they left the site.
“I moved the equipment myself,” Shen said in an interview. banner On Tuesday.
He added, “We were really skeptical from the beginning and from then on things just kind of went haywire.”
Musk’s company has a poor record of completing similar tunnels in other cities, often stymied by government regulations and contractual issues. When Shane’s company, Shane Trucking & Excavating, which works with major local clients such as the Grand Ole Opry and Nashville International Airport, was contacted by The Boring Company, they said they had some reservations.
“I told them very clearly — and I don’t want this to sound arrogant — but I told them, ‘Hey, my dad worked really hard to build a reputation in Nashville, and my brother and I work very hard to maintain that reputation,'” Shane said. “If you guys are really serious about doing this, you need to be 100 percent serious, because it will also be our reputation as part of it.”
After being reassured, Shen’s team took over the job in July.
He and his crew left the state-owned property on Rosa L. Parks Boulevard, where they were working on a proposed 9-mile tunnel from the state Capitol to the airport, after months of security and financial issues with Musk’s company.
It started with a change in salary every month or so.
“We were supposed to be paid every 15 days. And then they changed accounting firms, and then it went from 15 days to 60 days,” Shane said. It’s now been 123 days since they started digging, and Shane says the Boring Company has paid only five percent of what they’re owed.
According to Shane, he is still able to pay his employees on time, but is left holding the bag for unpaid money by the local trucking company The Boring Company. He says that due to non-payment on the project, other subcontractors have also broken ties.
The final blow to Shane’s removal of his team from the site came when several employees reported that a representative of the Boring Company was urging them to bail Shane and go straight to work for TBC on Monday.
“One of their key people sent a message to two of my welders from his work phone offering a job at $45 an hour,” Shane described, adding that the same TBC employee denied sending the message when confronted with the screenshots. “It’s actually a breach of contract.”
Shane also says he and other vendors have filed several OSHA safety complaints since working on the site but have received no responses. His biggest concerns are Boring employees not wearing proper personal protective equipment, such as hard hats, and unsafe shoring on the job, about which he says he has repeatedly complained to Boring Company.
“Where we’re excavating, we’re very low, there have to be concrete and different structures like that to prevent the slope from collapsing on you while you’re working,” Shane explained. “Where most people use concrete, they currently have – I’m not even kidding – they currently have wood. They had us install 2×12 wood.”
It was because of security concerns that Shane says he decided to make the issue public.
“We’re not coming forward in a vindictive manner,” Shen said. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt, definitely, and then, in the future, I have to be like, ‘Dang, I worked there, and I turned a blind eye to this.'”
Meanwhile, Shane said the amount owed to his company is in the six figures and he has hired a lawyer.
The Boring Company’s response
After banner When contacted by The Boring Company about Shane’s claims, vice president David Buss said he connected with Shane and would pay the outstanding invoices by the end of the day Wednesday and conduct a “full audit” on the error.
“It looks like we had some billing errors,” Buss said. banner“Unfortunately, you know, it was a very common thing, but I assured them that we’re going to make sure the invoices are issued tomorrow,”
Buss later clarified that he did not believe there was a “normal” practice at The Boring Company of not paying vendors, but rather that payment defaults occurred occasionally during the “normal course of business.”
“You hate to have an unhappy salesperson. Our goal is definitely to build good relationships,” Buss said. “And so my goal will be to find out what happened in this incident and then make sure it’s not linked to any other incidents.”
Buss also said he was looking into Shane’s claims about The Boring Company trying to hire contractors.
“It’s certainly not our practice to try to take over anyone, so I understand their frustration,” Buss said. “Hopefully this is something where we’re able to smooth it out and correct some of the things that happened on the site and caused this.”
Asked about the safety complaints, Buss said Shane did not raise any concerns on his call Tuesday and said he was unaware of any OSHA complaint but would look into it.
“Security is existential for our company,” Buss said. “We are thankful that Las Vegas has a long seven-year history of tunneling, and we have encountered only one construction-related injury that was not the company’s fault.”
rental headache
According to Buss, the estimated timeline had not changed, and work had not been slowed by workers leaving the site. However, Shen painted a different picture.
“Actually, we were the crew that was building the tunnel boring machine. So no one is building the tunnel boring machine right now, and the boring company is trying to hire welders, but they haven’t been able to secure any help,” Shen said Tuesday, noting that many potential employees won’t work on the project because of Musk’s reputation.
Shen said, “A lot of people don’t like Elon and his pay terms; the way he pays his employees is not traditional.”
Buss denied any problems with the appointment.
“We haven’t had a problem finding great talent in Nashville so far,” Buss said. “I think we’ve hired about 14 people now, and we’ll start growing the team as soon as we start mining operations.”
Instability and security have been widespread concerns around the project since its hasty public launch this summer, with little or no public input received by the state before approving the lease of the state-owned property where the digging is taking place.
As reports of a second tunnel being bored under Broadway and the West End emerged, Boring Company CEO Steve Davis held a two-hour live update session on the Musk-owned social media website
An hour later, Shane’s team left the site.
During Davis’ virtual meeting, members of the public could submit questions, some of which were answered by Boring Company leadership. Many of those questions came from State Senator Heidi Campbell (D-Nashville), who represents the area and has been a vocal critic of the project since its announcement.
“I would say the hype session they had on Twitter last night was disingenuous, if not dishonest, because it seemed like a utopian project and then, lo and behold, the very next day, we found out some people were leaving the site because they weren’t getting paid and they weren’t being treated well,” Campbell said. banner,
In addition to her concerns about irreparable damage to the site and whether the project would even be completed, Campbell said she was concerned about state liability if there were unsafe working conditions at the leased property and whether lawmakers had any way to stop the process.
“There’s no point in holding the Boring Company accountable for any of this stuff,” Campbell said of the lease. “They’ve already dug a big hole. But beyond that, if they move forward, move forward in any capacity, they have not proven that they are trustworthy enough to take care of the damage they caused.”
when shane spoke for the first time bannerHe said he did not intend to return to work even after getting paid, noting that his employees had expressed discomfort “because they didn’t think the management there was very good.”
Hours later, after hearing from the bus, Shen said he would consider returning “if they fix the situation on their end.”
Demetria Kalodimos contributed to this report,
it Article first time nashville banner Published on and here Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License,
<a href