District of North Vancouver Councillor Catherine Pope wants to know why North Shore taxpayers should be responsible for the $4 billion North Shore wastewater treatment plant fiasco.
“The North Shore wastewater treatment plant budget was $700 million when Metro Vancouver announced it in 2017,” said Coun. Catherine Pope. “Taxpayers deserve to know what went wrong and where is the accountability?”
Construction on the North Shore wastewater treatment plant was stopped in 2021 when Metro Vancouver fired the contractor Acciona, claiming deficiencies in the construction work, cost overruns and delays. Each is now suing the other for hundreds of millions of dollars, and the project has been shrouded in secrecy, apparently due to litigation concerns.
On Friday, Metro Vancouver announced the project would be restarted, but with a $3.86 billion price tag and a completion date of 2030. Taxpayers in the District of North Van, City of North Van, and West Van face an annual utility bill of $725.
Pope says Metro Vancouver needs to be more transparent, and taxpayers should not be saddled with the gobsmacking cost.“It’s outrageous. Why did it take Metro Vancouver three years to notice there were big problems with the project, and why has it taken another three years for the project to be started? Delays have led to inflationary pressures and enormous increases in construction costs.”
At a news conference Friday, Metro Vancouver’s CAO Jerry Dobrovolny announced the board of directors voted in favour of the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Task Force report, which has not been made public. District of NV Mayor Mike Little represents the District on Metro’s Wastewater Treatment Committee and the Task Force. Councillor Lisa Muri is a director on the Metro board.
Pope also wants to know why Victoria was able to build a similar wastewater treatment plant for $775 million in 2020. The project has the same capacity as the North Shore treatment plant. “We will need Provincial and Federal funding to complete this project,” said Pope. “But first, Metro Vancouver needs to provide transparency about the decision-making process and budget and cost estimates.”
Once again we have a glaring example of incompetence of the elected and unelected people our Cities! It’s time for a complete overhaul of the Govs reducing their staff, bureaucracy. Start with an initial 20% staff cut with a goal of 40% – 50%. And of course a reduction in property tax to go along with it. All this can be done without affecting the important services on the North Shore and around Metro Vancouver.
You’re right DNV. Engineering won’t even respond to a simple request with regard to roadwork information.. drafted a one page letter got a generic response saying they’re too busy to respond to inquiries in my letter I asked for a meeting never heard back. Sent a second email asking for a to review the plans at least ,never heard back. Seems government has gone from representing us to telling us what’s best for us .
Why would anyone expect anything less from the snakes that work on the boards and hold these jobs?They don’t care it’s not their money and the amount of time it’s taken to build it, and all the nightmares that have gone along with it is just another joke like everything else they get involved with.
In my opinion the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Task Force was set up by Metro to take the blame for the decision of the Metro Directors some years ago to order the three North Shore municipalities to go to tertiary treatment and Dobrovolny controlled the project. I understand that the Metro Directors have votes weighted by the population of the municipalities they represent and thus the three N.S. municipalities carry no weight in the decisions made by Metro. Is this correct? Metro Management, in my opinion, made a huge error at the very beginning and the Metro Board accepted the error but of course, we, the taxpayers, will pay for their ineptness as usual while they get big fees for attending meetings to vote on things that, in my opinion, they know little about.
I don’t think that’s correct when looking at the metro Vancouver board I think the district of North Vancouver had the most votes with five with lots of other municipalities just had one or two votes
Yes it is ridiculous to be that far off budget. However when you break down the numbers it works out to just about $2.00 a day per person. How much is a cup of coffe?
I’ve got a bit of an inside scoop on this. Numerous problems, and lots of blame to go around. This was a design-build-operate contract which should have, in theory, been no/low risk for Metro and the taxpayers. What should have been a relatively simply supply agreement with the contractor was governed by a 5,000 page contract – that in itself is crazy and never should have happened. Additionally, Metro supplied the contractor with erroneous geotechnical data on which the design was based (they should have let the contractor do their own geotechnical verification). Then the building codes and federal environmental regulations changed after the project started, which opened the door for design changes and additional costs. I could see the cost doubling, but seven-fold? Heads need to roll.
I am interested in seeing accountability for this fiasco.
What has been put in place to prevent further errors of this magnitude from
occurring again?
Thank you Mike for your clarification.