MONTREAL – The city of Montreal has announced it will proceed with three separate calls for tender to buy the components for its new, smaller-scale project to outfit non-residential properties with water meters.
The city said Friday morning it will buy the meters, equipment to read the meters and related accessories separately for an initial order of 2,900 meters.
The contracts are to be awarded sometime in the fall.
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Montreal auditor-general Jacques Bergeron severely criticized the original, larger version of the water-meter project in a damning report in September 2009, saying the city’s water department and the engineering firm the city had hired to manage the tendering process, BPR, severely limited the field of competition by putting all components of the 25-year project into one $355.8-million contract.
That deal combined engineering, public works and supplying the water meters and their parts.
The consortium Génieau won the contract, which was the largest awarded in the city’s history. Bergeron’s report on irregularities in the awarding of the deal led Mayor Gérald Tremblay to cancel the contract and fire two top civil servants in late 2009.
The new, scaled-down project calls for 16,200 meters to be installed in commercial, industrial and institutional buildings by 2018. The $55-million cost of the meters will be assumed by the property owners, which is another departure from the old project.
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