What Do Buses And An Arena In Windsor Have In Common

It should be an easy answer if you have been reading the newspaper recently.

Windsorites have lost something when Councillor Zuk decided not to run for office again. Oh, I don't mean a voice on Council. Who cares about that since Council is so ineffectual. No, I mean we may never see her do her little dance downtown and now it appears that her funky Bus Terminal is in big trouble.

In Saturday's Star, we read that "Skyrocketing construction costs have been showing up in bids such as the city's new downtown transit terminal, which came in recently at $1 million more than expected... The terminal building would be in the range of $3 million. But the lowest bid that came in -- from Gulf Construction -- was $4,181,174." In other words a Megaproject that is about 40% overbudget, so far! Pretty typical for many governmental projects it seems

Go back and read the story again and this time replace the bus terminal with an East end arena. You know, the $55 million palace that the City wants to build and operate alone that really costs $75-80 million when you add in land and architect's fees. I have heard that the East end arena is almost a done deal (IF it gets done at all) so the Toldo and Rosati families should give up gracefully now and save their money. Why be embarrassed when Administration shoots their project down.

But we all know that the project will not come in at the cost expected. If it is 40% higher, then we are looking at an arena project that will be over $100 M by the time it is done. Do you really think that the new Council will go for that when the two families would have built a Raceway arena for a maximum City contribution of $15M! See, it won't be Eddie's fault but that of Council if we do not get an arena. And I wonder if the Casino would be upset at not having a competitor too.

Can you imagine the amount that a new "public" bridge would be over budget by the time it was completed? And if a tunnel was involved too as the Mayor wants, I just hate to think about it. Just for your information, here is the standard form of excuses that can be used for every Megaproject when the high cost comes in. I have taken the comments from the bus terminal article:

1. inflated cost of building materials drives up the price of projects
2. contractors are being kept busy with work elsewhere
3. major projects have have drained the number of construction workers and skilled tradesmen available to do municipal projects
4. raw material is at a premium eg price of copper has quadrupled
5. the project could not be completed -- using the high-end materials the city wanted -- for the amount the city had in mind so many contractors did not bid.
6. the budget estimate set in 2000 was too low for 2006 costs.

So have you figured out the answer to the question I posed?

What they have in common is "TERMINAL." Buses have a terminal (or maybe not in Windsor) and the arena is terminal.