{"id":23766,"date":"2019-05-09T19:03:31","date_gmt":"2019-05-09T23:03:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=23766"},"modified":"2019-05-09T19:03:39","modified_gmt":"2019-05-09T23:03:39","slug":"funding-shortfalls-for-road-projects-raise-council-eyebrows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/funding-shortfalls-for-road-projects-raise-council-eyebrows\/","title":{"rendered":"Funding shortfalls for road projects raise Council eyebrows"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A further report\ninvestigating the funding for road rehabilitation projects on Yonge Street,\nEdward Street, Golf Links Drive and Dunning Avenue has been requested by\nCouncil after local lawmakers raised questions on how the project had been\nbudgeted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The projects were\nearmarked as part of the Town\u2019s 10-Year Capital Plan, but concerns were\nrecently raised by Councillor John Gallo about the road rehabilitation project\nbeing split into two phases and two tenders \u2013 and two phases for which money\nhad been under-budgeted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Councillor Gallo\nfirst raised his concerns at a General Committee meeting in early April and\nreiterated them once again at the last Council meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said he had \u201ctwo\nmain issues\u201d with the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was a budgeted\nitem about a year ago as one project and, as we know from the report, it was divided\nunder the rationale it was a large project,\u201d he said. \u201cPart One was tendered\nand approved and Part Two was over-budget. My concern is\u2026process and Council\nauthority, to me, are sacrosanct and I don\u2019t waver on that. When Council passes\na resolution on a project, Council should expect the project to be complete in\nits entirety. Parsing off a piece and doing it, and then submitting a report to\nCouncil for another piece that is somewhat arbitrarily\u2026separated, and that\nsecond piece is overbudget by 10 per cent of the total budget — $365,000\nover-budget of $3.6 million project.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of the\nday, he said, it was a project approved by Council and it was hard to follow\nthe bouncing ball on just how the project had come to be split.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe rationale was\nfor the second part of the asphalt costs were budgeted for last year, about a\nyear ago, and they are higher now,\u201d Councillor Gallo continued. \u201cIf that is\ntrue for Part Two, why wouldn\u2019t it be true for Part One? You simply can\u2019t\nseparate them because the tender (for Part 1) was issued in March of this year.\nI am struggling because I want this project to go forward and I actually don\u2019t\nhave an issue with the project, and it is on our 10 year capital plan and\nshould go forward \u2013 in a perfect world, I believe, staff should have come back\nto us with the entire project and said, \u2018It\u2019s over budget. We need more money\nfor the entire project. Can we have that to move it forward?\u2019 To me, that would\nhave been the appropriate thing to do; not split the project, do half of it,\nand then come to Council in the second half and ask for money because it is\noverbudget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs we all know,\nthere is an economy of scale and we do one project, you tend to get a better\nprice if it is larger. We all know that the Town is capable of doing large\nprojects, $30 million projects. A $3 million project, to me, the justification\nthat it was too big to go out once, I just have a tough time understanding\nthat.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the discussion\ncontinued around the Council table, Councillor Harold Kim said Councillor Gallo\nhad made \u201csome very good points.\u201d He asked Acting Town Treasurer Jason Gaertner\non the implications of discontinuing or postponing the road rehabilitation\nproject. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Gaertner\nresponded that the first part of the project has to proceed as tendered, but\nthe second part was still up air. That being said, he added, this road\nrehabilitation project was part of a larger plan and not proceeding could\nimpact forecasted service levels in Aurora. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To these points,\nCouncillor Kim said he was fine with going ahead with both phases of the\nproject, but said Council \u201cwould feel more comfortable if we had a deeper dive\nor forensic analysis as to how this took shape and became over-budgeted and how\nit came to be two parts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLet\u2019s move ahead\nwith this, but I would like to have staff come back with a report as to how to\nmake sure this process doesn\u2019t unfold like the way it did.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Added Councillor Wendy Gaertner: \u201cI would like\nto echo what both Councillors have said, and I do think we need a report on how\nthis happened because it shouldn\u2019t have happened. We have a certain process, so\nlet\u2019s find out where the glitch was in the process and not do it again.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A further report investigating the funding for road rehabilitation projects on Yonge Street, Edward Street, Golf Links Drive and Dunning Avenue has been requested by Council after local lawmakers raised questions on how the project had been budgeted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-6bk","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-14 13:39:55","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23766\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}