For years, residents on streets like Valleyview Crescent and Maurino Court in the southwest quadrant of Bradford lived with poor quality roads. Built in the 1970s, several of the roads had never received a final coat of asphalt.
For years, Coun. Peter Dykie pushed to have the streets included on the town’s annual schedule of road reconstruction.
In 2018, the tender was finally awarded to North Rock Group Ltd., which bid $5.475 million to replace watermains and rehabilitate roads and sidewalks on Maple Grove Ave., Valleyview Crescent, Maurino Court, Maple Court and Gordon Court.
Another $406,611 in non-contractor costs, including engineering, was also budgeted.
But things didn’t go smoothly. Although some savings were found, there were also “unforeseen encumbrances,” stated an engineering report presented in Tuesday night’s meeting of council. By the time North Rock completed the work, the cost had ballooned to $6.252 million, 14.1 percent over the tender bid.
“I understand this was a pretty big project… There was the odd surprise,” acknowledged Coun. Gary Lamb.
The changes led to a two-year ‘discussion’ with the contractor, that has now been settled – with the result that the project, coming in over-budget, needed council approval for additional funding.
The final cost was $6.675 million – an increase of $115,000 over the $6.56 million approved budget.
Deputy Mayor James Leduc asked if the town’s new tendering process will eliminate some of the unexpected cost increases, over and above tender bids. “Our tendering process is a little more extensive now,” he suggested.
“This contract I believe is a couple of years old,” agreed Director of Engineering and Development Services, Peter Loukes. “Over the last few years, we have been making a number of changes to our tendering process, to our tendering documents, to our specifications and our instructions to contractors. We’ve been cleaning up a lot of our processes for identifying and approving extra work orders.”
As a result, Loukes said, “We’re confident that moving forward, the newer contracts will be… a bit more efficient from the standpoint of being able to process through the payments, and (offer) a bit more surety on the budgets and the numbers put in place.”
Mayor Rob Keffer noted that residents have been asking for the road repairs for at least the past decade. “It’s good to see the project has been done,” he said. “It was a complex project with a lot of streets involved, and a lot of unknowns.”
Council approved the additional funding, which will come from the town’s Capital Replacement Reserve.
“I think residents are overall happy to see these improvements,” said Coun. Dykie, suggesting that there are “lessons to be learned” for future projects.
“The minute you go on people’s property – it’s town property, but people assume it’s their property – the minute you go on someone’s property, retaining wall, sidewalk, driveway, it isn’t easy to satisfy that homeowner,” Dykie said. Residents expect full restoration, even if the work is carried out on town-owned property and the right-of-ways, he said.
“It’s very hard to satisfy people,” Dykie said, urging town staff to be aware of the full cost of disruptions. “There’s always surprises, and it’s so difficult to mitigate these problems.”
“They want their street and property to be put back in pristine condition,” agreed Mayor Keffer.