VANCOUVER — Calls for a public inquiry into what went wrong with Metro Vancouver’s North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant in blowing its budget by nearly $3 billion are increasing with politicians from at least two municipalities demanding transparency.
New Westminster Coun. Daniel Fontaine issued a plea Friday for a public inquiry into the “financial fiasco,” echoing the call by North Van District Coun. Catherine Pope on Monday that there at least be a public audit of finances that ballooned from an initial budget of $700 million to the $3.86 billion announced March 22.
“I’ve been getting a lot of messages of support from people who live in the district,” Pope said.
Whatever form it takes, Pope said the inquiry, audit or investigation needs to be independent, because “the public has a right to know what’s gone wrong.” That independent look would consider what decisions were made, why they were made and whether or not they were made appropriately, “otherwise the public’s confidence in the system of Metro Vancouver is broken,” Pope said.
Federal cabinet minister Jonathan Wilkinson, an MP for North Van, also said the public, particularly those on the North Shore who will be on the hook for 45 per cent of the wastewater plant’s cost, are owed greater transparency.
And Wilkinson warned Metro not to expect any bailout from the federal government, according to The North Shore News. Ottawa and Victoria contributed $400 million to the plant’s initial budget, but the senior governments can’t be expected to be on the hook for overruns simply because they participated in financing.
Metro has conducted its own review of the problematic North Shore project, but much of that information is caught up in litigation between the regional district and the former contractor that it fired from the job, said chief administrative officer Jerry Dobrovolny.
On March 22, Dobrovolny said the bill to replace its existing Lions Gate wastewater plant with the North Shore facility had skyrocketed to $3.86 billion, more than twice the $1.06 billion that Metro said the beleaguered project would cost in 2022. That 2022 estimate, however, was already almost 50 per cent higher than the $700 million budget set when work started on the project in 2017 and was supposed to be complete by 2020.
“The what happened is pretty straightforward,” Dobrovolny said. “We had a design-build-finance contract signed with a contractor who was responsible for delivering the project by the end of 2020 at a time the construction industry was stable, and they didn’t deliver.”
Why that didn’t happen, however, is subject to duelling lawsuits between that contractor, the Spanish infrastructure giant Acciona, which alleges the site and the regional district’s design were inadequate, and Metro, which alleges misrepresentation, negligence and bad faith actions.
“The difficulty is that we’re in litigation now, so if we were to go into a big discussion about that, a lot of that would not be public,” Dobrovolny said.
Pope, however, believes that there is more information that Metro can make public in the interim.
“For sure, some of it cannot be talked about and that will drag on for years,” Pope said of the lawsuits.
“But there’s lots of ways that you can have more information (made public) than doing absolutely nothing that can help clarify a lot of decision-making,” Pope said. “And I think that it’s fair to ask (Metro chairman George Harvie) to release a lot more information than what has been given to us.”
Metro has been put in the position of trying to advance both the North Shore treatment plant and a replacement for its Iona wastewater treatment plant at the same time to meet federal requirements to upgrade its sewage treatment.
Iona and Lions Gate are the only two wastewater plants on the West Coast to provide primary treatment, which simply separates solids from effluent before discharging to either the Fraser River or Pacific Ocean.
The North Shore replacement pant, which was originally to be completed by 2020, now won’t be done until 2030. And the Iona project, which had a deadline of 2030, isn’t scheduled to be completed until 2035.
“We have regulatory requirements for both of them,” Dobrovolny said. “We need to be shown that we’re moving heaven and earth to deliver the projects as quickly as possible.”
