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Originally Posted by cganuelas1995
And you can't expect EVERYONE to use transit, just because you cram more busses into a route.
Quite a few high paying jobs, like garbage man, trucker, electrician, and the like require drivers.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut
Or if you live in Vancouver and your on-call job needs you in Pitt Meadows today and Ladner tomorrow, so you need a vehicle (etc, etc, etc)...
Seriously, let's get a SkyTrain, LRT and BRT rapid network throughout the Metro that connects everything to everything else, THEN we can talk about a car-free society.
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This old tired straw-man... Just let it rest. Nobody is saying that. Nobody is expecting that. That would be impossible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WarrenC12
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That makes for an outrageous read.
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[...]
Fixed price not fixed
The bridge was to be built under a fixed-price contract. If any extra, unforeseen work was needed, both sides would have to agree to a change order.
Change orders are common on big infrastructure projects. On the Port Mann project there were more than 130 such orders for $300 million in extra work.
New figures obtained by the CBC show the contractor was paid a total of $572 million above the fixed price.
[...]
Oversight contracted out
B.C. builds infrastructure unlike anywhere else in Canada, by contracting out the top oversight job, and not having a public servant represent taxpayers' interests.
In this case, the top job went to a private sector engineer named Gary Webster.
For $390 an hour, the province hired Webster for a position known as the authority's representative, meaning he represented B.C. taxpayers on the project.
TI Corp said he was just an adviser, but the contract said Webster's role was to "make all consequential decisions," approve change orders and sign monthly invoices after confirming the contractor did the work.
Two TI Corp officials would then sign to approve payment.
Five months into the job, Webster was made a partner at KPMG, which was also in charge of the advisory and audit work for TI Corp which earned KPMG more than $17 million as of the end of last year.
The arrangement was controversial. According to retired ethics professor Ian Greene, the person in charge of a project like this should not also work for the consulting firm hired to both manage and audit the bridge's construction.
"I think it is very dangerous to contract out the management of projects like that," said Greene, who taught ethics at York University's political science department for 30 years.
"How can you serve both the taxpayers and look out for their best interests and also KPMG who employs you?"
"How can you appear to be completely impartial about that?"
[...]
Auditor General's findings
But as early as 2009, B.C.'s acting auditor general raised concerns about Webster's invoice approval process after a routine annual audit.
Russ Jones noted the procedures "were not adequately documented."
In a statement KPMG said, "The [Office of the Auditor General] did not direct any particular review process that TI Corp should follow."
TI Corp said it improved its procedures, and insists intense oversight was in place during the project, but following CBC News inquiries, the crown corporation asked B.C.'s auditor general to review its processes in July.
During the summer of 2009, as construction on the bridge ramped up, the amount of money being spent was beginning to raise questions.
Just five months into the project, Webster and TI Corp had authorized $389 million in payments to the contractor as of August 2009, according to documents obtained by CBC.
But that amount didn't match the progress of construction, say two of the consultants who spoke to CBC and reviewed some of the leaked documents.
The contract says payments can only be made for progress of work, to protect taxpayers if a contractor were to go out of business.
The consultants pointed to more than $100 million in items they say were not related to progress of work.
They include employee moves, vehicles, equipment/insurance premiums, a request-for-proposal fee, and a design success fee, all unusual items to be paid on a design-build contract, say the consultants.
[...]
Hundreds of pages of internal TI Corp and KPMG documents, including invoices, change orders, emails, and spreadsheets, were leaked anonymously to CBC.
One key document was a construction update in January 2012 that warned the bridge opening date would be delayed by 18 months, because of complications with the Cape Horn Interchange in Coquitlam.
The province wanted to stay on schedule, and open the bridge as planned in December 2012, say the consultants.
So TI Corp paid hundreds of millions more for more staff, supervisors, and equipment to speed up work on the interchange.
But construction data, which tracked the progress of the work, didn't match the invoices.
Consultants plotted that progress on a graph.
They discovered that at the time the contractor was predicting an 18-month delay, their analysis showed the interchange was only two months behind.
The contractor, Kiewit Flatiron, declined CBC's request for an interview.
TI Corp told CBC the contractor was dealing with legitimate delays caused by third parties, utilities and weather.
"These delays were out of the control of the contractor, and outside the scope of the Design Build Agreement. TI Corp instructed the contractor to apply resources to complete this section on schedule," said Greg Johnson, TI Corp's director of communications, in a statement to CBC.
KPMG said it rejected the contractor's extension request, and negotiated it down from 18 to six months.
[...]
Extra work not needed
The leaked review contained several other findings.
Even though the report cited delays on the Cape Horn interchange, it said work wasn't actually accelerated on that interchange at all.
Instead, the extra resources, staff and equipment were "reallocated" to the Surrey side of the bridge.
"There was a discordance between the data and the narratives," concluded the review.
While TI Corp and Webster had approved the acceleration invoices, month after month in 2012, they said they acted on all the concerns raised in the review and later renegotiated and got $200 million back.
But the review found another discrepancy.
The final part of the project, the Fraser Heights connecter in Surrey was finishing faster even though that work was not required for another year, according to the contract schedule.
TI Corp rejected any suggestion that the millions paid to speed up the project were spent elsewhere, and says the team working on that part of the project finished early because they were good at their jobs, said a former TI Corp official, who spoke to CBC on background.
KPMG said it was "not the result of any direction on the part of TI Corp but rather reflected the contractor's own decision about how to deploy its resources."
The former TI Corp official who spoke to CBC confirmed that the Crown corporation hired a second auditing firm to review some acceleration invoices in the summer of 2012, to make sure they were not overpaying.
A consultant familiar with the audit told CBC it also concluded that much of the extra work TI Corp had approved to speed up the project was already covered by the base contract.
[...]
B.C. rules not followed
Another example of "weak oversight" was that TI Corp did not establish an audit committee during construction, say the consultants.
All B.C. Crown corporations are supposed to form a committee of experts to oversee spending.
It didn't establish such a committee until 2013, when the bulk of the money was spent and the bridge built.
Sources close to the project say at least $150 million would not have been spent if the project had proper oversight.
Insiders also say B.C.'s procurement rules were not followed on some change orders.
While extra overpasses were needed, and power, rail and sewer lines had to be moved, any other extra construction worth more than $100,000 should have gone to tender.
But that didn't always happen on the Port Mann project.
For example, the $31 million Fraser Heights Bridge and a parking lot in Langley were both sole sourced to Kiewit Flatiron, without going to tender, and were then subcontracted to other contractors, adding layers of extra cost to taxpayers.
The park-and-ride was the worst example, said one of the consultants.
"The government gave away about $100 million and there were three layers of subcontracting and additional markups. The cost was then close to double of what it could have been built for," he said.
TI Corp's former official claimed they did nothing wrong and were allowed to award the work to Kiewit Flatiron using a change order, to avoid having contractors overlapping on the job site.
He said most of the costs of that parking lot were later borne by the Ministry of Transportation and Translink, reducing TI Corp's costs to $26 million.
TI Corp said in the end they paid $300 million for additional work, including $99 million for acceleration and $72 million for extra gravel, some of which was linked to acceleration.
The leaked review said TI Corp was too generous with one of the bigger ticket items needed to build the bridge.
More than three million cubic metres of gravel were used constructing the project. The contract stated exactly how much gravel could be used for free from nearby provincial gravel pits.
TI Corp allowed the contractor to take double what was allowed from the nearest pit.
And rather than rely on provincial gravel from pits farther away, the contractor was also allowed to invoice for commercially purchased gravel which saved time, but cost millions, according to the review.
But KPMG says that gravel was needed and the contractor did not exceed contract limits.
[...]
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http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-co...elieve-cost-taxpayers-millions-1.4144535
Anyway, that's an important read when we're talking about the PMB and the Liberal governments' transportation legacy.
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Last edited by SFUVancouver; Sep 7, 2017 at 11:11 PM.
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