Mayor Don Iveson has never been a happy camper when it comes to major project delays in the city. Another one has cropped up, the Touch the Water promenade, and because of the mis-management that’s happened, Iveson wants an audit done to protect around $3.5 million now in jeopardy.
The promenade has been in the planning stages for five years, but has hit a crucial sticking point because of land contamination in the area.
Iveson made a motion to bring in the city auditor. City council will vote on that next week. He said it’s helped in the past with other projects that have grabbed headlines for mis-management.
“It’s helped us make changes that are already improving our project management practices. So I see it as constructive opportunity for the city to learn from the mistakes that delayed this project and jeopardized the grant funding.”
Iveson said how the city manages big projects now compared to five years ago is night and day.
“Part of our new approach to project management is to do more evaluation work, more design work, more geo-technical and more site evaluation contamination analysis before we promise, ‘oh yeah, we can get this done in two years,’ because every time we hit a risk a like that, then the project goes sideways, the project gets delayed and then the story is that how did we not know this?”
The contamination is on the old EPCOR property. It’s created a hold up for the $10.4 million project that the city has to convince the province and federal government that they can still pull off.
“We’ve had some discussions with the executive director (of the River Valley Alliance) to say that we think there’s a good opportunity to be able to get the money back or to have the money carry forward that the province has committed, but nobody can speak to what the federal government will do with their portion,” planning boss Peter Ohm said.
The three levels of government each share one-third of the cost. The contanimation issues will probably take a year to investigate, but Ohm told council’s Urban Planning Committee they think they can still get construction on track by 2019.
Lynn Parish, the president of the Rossdale Community League, is also worried.
“If we release this funding will we ever get it back” she asked the committee, pointing out the project has won an urban design award.
Another holdup has been the delayed construction of the Walterdale Bridge, because the bridge’s lay-down area has tied up space where promenade work would be done.