City adds $152 million to LRT Stage 2 to cover unexpected costs
Blair Crawford, Ottawa Citizen
Published Nov 07, 2023 • Last updated 52 minutes ago • 2 minute read
The city plans to boost its funding for Stage 2 of the Confederation Line by another $152 million, including $110 million in a contingency fund to cover unexpected costs.
Members of the city’s finance and corporate services committee approved the additional spending Tuesday without debate. It still requires the support of the full city council for final approval.
When Stage 2 got the go ahead in 2019, the budget included $152 million in contingency funding, representing about 3.3 per cent of the total $4.6 billion price tag for Stage 2. The city later added another $25 million to that pot, but inflation, late changes in design such as gas heaters for track switches, improved noise barriers, revisions to station design and other unexpected expenses have drained nearly all of that money.
The $110 million infusion into the contingency fund approved by the committee Tuesday will be used to pay for changes learned from Stage 1 construction, such as better sound mitigation, as well as better barriers along Highway 417, and upgrades to the transit operations control centre. Another unexpected cost is that changing provincial rules have made it more expensive to treat and dispose of some 278,000 dump truck loads of soil generated during the Stage 2 excavations.
In total, the $152 million increase approved Tuesday is broken down as $42 million for project oversight costs, $35 million for major variations in the project, $25 million for soil management and $50 million for general contingency costs.
According to a city report on the budget increase, that last $50 million is needed “to be able to respond to continuing project claims/risks, additional bundled project costs, new potential lessons learned from Stage 1 leading to further technical changes” along with general cost escalation.
The next section of Ottawa’s LRT, the north-south running Trillium Line, is expected to begin service next spring. The Stage 2 eastern extension of the Confederation Line to Trim Road is expected to open in early 2025 while the western extension to Moodie Drive and Algonquin College won’t be ready until late 2026 at the earliest.
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...expected-costs
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