Promises

Things go wrong. Never quite as planned. A sweeping generalization for sure, but when it comes to the municipality building things—it’s bank. A rock-solid fact. Municipal projects take longer and cost more. Always. Right up until the moment the shovel hits the ground, estimates of time and money are shapeless, vaporous phantoms. Without texture, weight or significance. Like trying to drive a wet noodle into limestone with a marshmallow hammer.

Like a Donald Trump trade deal, municipal procurement plans are empty and void of significance, barely a breath after they are signed.

It’s hard for governments to build things. It’s not just local governments— boondoggle is a multi-jurisdictional verb. A new payroll system for federal employees was supposed to cost $309 million. Canadian taxpayers have spent $5.1 billion on it so far. A gas-generating plant was in the early stages of construction in Oakville. But when the neighbours complained, the province moved it to Napanee. The original cost was estimated at $310 million. By the time the last pipes were tightened and final wires were attached, the total cost had risen to more than $1.1 billion.

Locally, when measured by the sheer number of dollars thrown into the air, it is hard to beat the sewage plant on the hill in Picton— more than double the capital cost and much higher operating costs than estimated by consultants all those years ago.

Yet there remains a soft spot in my heart for a set of toilets in a cinderblock building in Ameliasburgh Park. After fire destroyed the original two-holer in 2017, Council approved plans for a new park shitter. Four holes, no waiting. The estimated cost: $85,000. The money was approved. The low bid came in at $175,000 plus tax—double the estimate. But a year later, the wee building wasn’t finished. Relations with the builder had soured so badly that Council had to cancel the contract. We never learned how much it cost to finish the toilets at Roblin Lake, but readers can safely speculate it was well-north of $50k per hole.

I dredge up these sad memories to remind readers that the water and sewer trunkline construction in Wellington was supposed to be finished by now. The pounding was supposed to be done. The pipes were to have been buried and conveying water from the new water tower (estimated cost $6.9 million, final cost $10.5 million). Sewer pipes were to be ready to do their dirty duty. The Millennium Trail was to have been restored to its former recreational splendour by now.

That was the plan anyway. Expected completion by Q2 2025, wrote the County’s Manager of Engineering in the trunklines bid report in November 2023.

It’s not going to happen. Not even close. Work crews continue to inch along the trail. Day by day. Week by week. The expectation is that digging and pounding in the village will continue into next year.

Okay, so we blew the on-time bit, what about the on-budget part, you ask? Worse.

Two Augusts ago, the municipality calculated the cost of the 2.4-kilometre trunklines at $12.2 million. But by November, Shire Hall’s engineering team already knew it was in trouble. The lowest bid had come in at more than $16 million (about 7 per cent higher than estimated earlier that year). But the news was much worse.

Detailed design found it would be prohibitively expensive to punch deep enough through the unforgiving bedrock that lay just below the village’s surface. Gravity alone wouldn’t be enough to keep the sewer lines flowing downhill. A new, unforeseen, $7 million pumping station was needed to propel the poo onward to the treatment plant.

The cost of the trunklines had already risen to $24 million (nearly 100 per cent more than estimated) before the diggers showed up.

The contractor has been pounding rock for more than a year. They have many months still to go.

Maybe it all works out. Maybe the bid price will stick. Maybe the contractor swallows its losses. Eats time and money. Maybe. More likely, there is a reckoning coming between the County and the contractor.

Shire Hall, residents and waterworks ratepayers— the stakeholders with the most at stake in this project— must know the true cost of this project when all is said and done. Every expense, including the cost of car repairs incurred on the 10-kilometre detour last winter, must be tallied. It must conduct a deliberate and thorough review of the entire trunklines project.

Shire Hall is obliged to fully account for this project and report the results.

Further, there ought to be consequences for those who made the estimates, forecasts and projections that Council relied upon. As if it were the real world. There should be consequences for the consultants and managers. Ignoring them—burying mistakes and miscalculations— ensures it will happen again and again.

Such a review must also occur before this municipality embarks on another infrastructure escapade. It must understand the risk and the quantum of exposure to existing water ratepayers. Shire Hall cannot continue to wing it or simply shrug its shoulders when things go wrong on our behalf.

It’s painful when the subject is a $200,000 toilet—it is potentially ruinous on a $300 million project.

We might ask ourselves: Who is it for? The developer’s billboard signs north of the village are beginning to fade. There are no indications that tracts of new homes or a million square feet of commercial development are imminent in Wellington. But that was the deal. That was the arrangement. That was the promise. These new developments were going to pay these big bills.

Instead, it is overdue and overbudget—and existing water users are left to foot the bill.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca