downtownordinary
Active Member
Absolutely they can agree to making payments earlier but unfortunately agreeing to an adjusted schedule is never that black and white. There are thousands of other things that could be delaying the project unrelated to this design change and when all those things are happening at once it's difficult to fully determine the cause of the delay. The schedules can be manipulated any number of ways to show X causes this delay with cascading effects. Obviously Metrolinx and IO review those things but it gets complicated quickly. So part of not wanting to change it may be due to inertia. The Contractor may give an outrageous estimate for the additional work because they don't want to go through the headache of changing schedules and going down a scheduling battle with Metrolinx and Infrastructure Ontario.I would note that the City of Brampton agreed to eat the design costs.
The province can easily agree to begin making its payments on the existing schedule, irrespective of any delay cause at this particular location.
Which really shouldn't be material.
On the first part, while it certainly is a political decision as to whether to amend the contract/design, I don't see this is a high burden choice. There are no real opponents to the change, and in a worst case scenario of costs, this is barely a rounding error on the provincial budget.
And while the cost may be a rounding error on the provincial budget it would still be a significant impact on the project budget as well as potentially Metrolinx program budget and may require Treasury Board resubmissions to get the funding. If there is the political will to do it, it can be done but either way, since its a change to an existing contract it will cost a premium and the costs are not as outrageous as they initially appear. Sorry for getting in the weeds here a bit, just trying to flag the concerns with the delivery model and not necessarily specific to this project.