What was the first thing you thought about when you heard that the City of Guelph had decided to remove the general contractor on the Guelph Police headquarters renovation?
The population of Guelph, at least the ones who were here 10 years ago, might be forgiven for having Urbacon flashbacks when they got the news. The controversy about the firing of the contractor on the new city hall, and the subsequent cost overruns and court settlement, still gives people in this town a sore stomach, so of course there’s no appetite for a repeat.
But let’s take a moment to go beyond the headlines.
First, let us consider the fact that the city built the Market Parkade and the Victoria Road Rec Centre both on time and on budget. The rec centre looked touch and go, but anyone that’s done large scale renovations on their own knows that what looks like a mess today can be turned into a job well done by tomorrow with the right contractor.
Even the best contractors have bad days, or even bad weeks, or months.
On Thursday, less than 48 hours after being removed from the Guelph Police project, Jasper Construction was also dismissed from the construction of the East Lions Community Centre, a $21 million project in London that was also supposed to be completed last spring. A few weeks ago, they were also removed from the $24.5-million renovation of Great Lakes Secondary School in Sarnia.
Whatever is going on with this contractor, it has nothing to do with Guelph.
Having said that, the news fit so easily into the ready-made narrative that the city can’t do big complicated projects. Government, after all, is not run like a business, and business can never, ever fail be it though malfeasance or incompetence, right?
The story also fit into another ready-made narrative that suits the moment. Less than 24 hours after the announcement, a large crowd gathered in front of the still-renovating police HQ to protest. If there was a worst time to find out that this project is off the rails, then this is it.
On top of all that, there has been community misgivings about the shape of this project, and its expense for a while. Originally due for completion in the spring of 2019, every month there was no official ribbon cutting was another round in the gatling gun of skeptics who saw another Urbacon-esque scandal in the making.
The quarterly reporting, one of the changes implemented following that controversy, offered no insights or reassurance. March’s report, arriving almost a year after the renovation was supposed to be complete, said that the project was on track and 97 per cent complete while 96 per cent of the project’s $34 million budget has been spent.
I’ve got to say that while I’m not expert in construction, the renovation on the police building did not look 97 per cent complete to me when I was last there in March. To say that something is three percentage points away from completion is to imply that all that’s left to do is install some lights, or lay down some carpet, not that entire hallways are still stripped and bare with major construction work left to be done.
That’s why the way that the city handled the announcement is so frustrating. The press release was posted on the city’s website the afternoon before a nation holiday, with minimum detail, and no notice was sent to the media that it had been posted like they usually do. If the city was trying to pretend that they were hiding something, they did a great job.
This isn’t just a problem with contractors, but a problem with transparency. The City is so allergic to bad news that it can’t help itself to make it look like they’re doing something wrong even if they’re not doing anything wrong.
The press release itself was written in such stifling legalese that it’s hard to tell if the contractor was fired at all: The city ended “the general contractor’s involvement with the project,” but it’s also “not a termination of the contract”? Is this Schrodinger’s renovation? The contractor is both on and off the project depending on who’s holding a hammer?
It terms of ready-made narratives, posting a lone 200-word press release tells you absolutely nothing. It’s like the mayor’s report on in-camera procedures where he tells us that council went into closed meeting and talked about what they went into the closed meeting to talk about.
If the city’s only mistake is that it put its faith in the wrong contractor, then why the dodge? Actually, it doesn’t matter the reason why things have gone wrong, the fact is that they did, and since that’s $34.1 million of taxpayer money we’re talking about, we’re owed more that a news dump on the verge of a holiday.
