Is there light at the end of the tunnel?
Some Toronto politicians admit they’re part of the problem when it comes to rising costs and missed deadlines.

thestar.com
March 20, 2015
By Tess Kalinowski

In the world of construction and engineering, it's referred to as scope creep. To the public, it's just a series of excuses for why another project is late or over-budget.

It starts as a new transit line, a public square, a road or a building. Then the disruption of construction forces the supervising agency to throw in some landscaping and street improvements. Or, crews come across an old sewer pipe that needs replacing and it only makes sense to do it while the street is splayed.

The cost and the delays add up.

The Spadina subway extension is just one of the Toronto region mega-projects suffering budgetary bloat and deadlines best seen through a rearview mirror.

The reason is seldom as simple as mismanagement, said Councillor Joe Mihevc, a TTC board member who compares public projects to home renovations.

“You start knocking down the walls and you find knob-and-tube, you find lead pipes, you find un-insulated walls. What you thought was going to be the project doesn't end up being the project,” he said.

The same applies to public buildings and facilities. Engineers at Union Station learned some footings they thought existed didn’t. Wires are found, with no idea of where they start or end.

“Just the investigation alone takes months of work,” said Mihevc.

Sometimes it just makes sense to add other improvements or fixes as a project is being developed.

But cost overruns are so pervasive the public has lost confidence in government to manage big-money projects properly, said Deputy Mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong, who sits on the TTC board and chaired the public works committee in the previous term of council. (A Forum Research poll this month showed 48 per cent of respondents, the majority of those with an opinion, agreed that “it is impossible to complete large public construction projects on budget or on schedule in Toronto.”)

Minnan-Wong has been investigating ways to save the city money, looking at best practices in other jurisdictions. The provincial agency Infrastructure Ontario’s alternative financing and procurement model is one avenue Minnan-Wong believes Toronto needs to explore more widely.

Another is job order contracting. Used in the U.S., it applies a pre-determined price for construction materials and work to prevent change orders from inflating project costs.

The responsibility for better management resides in several places, he said:

• Politicians need to exercise discipline when it comes to widening the scope of projects. Just because someone's building a subway doesn't mean the local politician should add in another station and then let someone else add in another exit.
• Many projects are under-researched and under-budgeted to help get them approved. There needs to be more up-front engineering work.
• Contractors are also notorious for under-bidding. They lowball the price knowing there will be changes and that they can charge more for materials, he said.