Re: Munster Wastewater File - Futile attempts to obtain honest cost breakdowns from city staff

Subject: Re: Munster Wastewater File …
Futile attempts to obtain honest cost breakdowns from city staff.

Sent: February 4, 2004 - (Slightly amended, February 20, 2004, for greater clarity.)

Your January 14, 2004 response to my (December 1, 2003) request for simple costing information still lacks the required information to reconcile the numbers in your Annex “E” chart. Why are you finding it so difficult to fulfill this simple request? Could it be, because the numbers in the Annex “E” are not founded entirely upon fact? It seems that if the figures in Annex “E” were honestly supportable, you would have long since sent the supporting data, and we would not be still having this time-wasting conversation! The Environmental Information Network (EIN), Inc. seems to have characterized the city’s type of approach quite succinctly, when it says, “Reports based on faulty foundations of inconsistent, missing, or biased data are meaningless, misleading, and worthless. To deliberately present bad data as if it were meaningful is scientifically invalid and immoral.”

The city’s mishandling of this affair begs the question: Is it not unlawful for city staff and politicians to violate their fiduciary trust to taxpayers, by misrepresenting the true costs of the available options?

Three significant conclusions can be drawn from the city’s attempts to impose the forcemain option:

1.)       While attempting to defend the forcemain option by fabricating spuriously low costs ---compounded over
        an unrealistic 90 year period--- the city has only convinced the public that its cost arguments are
        fraudulent;

2.) There is no justifiable rationale for neglecting the well-founded safety concerns of 7,000 citizens (who deserve better from their municipality), when total safety and peace-of-mind can be achieved by the use of either of the two communal treatment options ---each with guaranteed, fixed-price bids--- that have been presented at 20 to 30 cents on the dollar (relative to the “cost-plus” forcemain option);

3.) The only foreseeable outcome from the city’s current deceitful course, (i.e.: that of pushing ahead with the pipeline option on the basis of misrepresented facts), would be to lead to an even greater squandering of tax dollars, further litigation and possibly criminal charges against any persons found responsible for acting in bad faith, breach of trust, guilty of fraud, corruption, abuse of office, misappropriation of tax dollars, public endangerment, and more.

City officials are in the process of knowingly committing a grave injustice against a populace. An unnecessary, added burden of worry (at additional expense) is about to be imposed upon an entire community of 7,000 law-abiding residents, with no conceivable upside or benefit. There are only negatives: of both, elevated health risk and 500% in added cost. Where's the rationale?

It is said, “A fool cannot reason, a lawbreaker will not reason, and a slave dare not reason.” In the event you feel you fit the last category, may we urge you to pass this upward through the city’s bureaucratic and political hierarchy, until you find those persons (in the “will not reason” category) who are responsible for ordering and drafting the fraudulent Annex “E” chart, and have them try to reconcile the true cost itemizations against their bogus totals. It’s that simple, Sir.

In the meantime, take a good look at your own conscience.

Yours truly,

Richard Bendall

Encl: (See below)

Below, is a “Revised Annex E”, adjusted to reflect the more complete costing information supplied by Totten-Simms Hubicki - (RMOC-Commissioned report of February 13, 1998), Brackenshiel Study (Independent, 107-pg.-“Critical Analysis of the Munster Treatment Project” – 2002), (Sections 3.4 to 3.5.4), and other current (city and independent) engineering documentation, reports, contract information, and correspondence:

Correspondence from J. White, P. Eng - regarding city's costing figures

City appears to be applying the "legal-bully approach", to suppress citizens'
cost inquiries and further block flow of costing information to ratepayers:
Threats from city's solicitor, (in lieu of addressing problem). --- Ratepayer's reply

The city's pattern of stonewalling continues...service to the public interest, is the casualty:
Obfuscation supplants transparency and traceability

Pipeline and Additional Capital Costs - (Forcemain Option)

Pipeline cost (quoted by city)       $4,000,000   (Includes $1,200,000 for design & construction oversight costs,
                                                                                           Pipeline materials of $2,000,000, plus other materials and installation costs)
Pipeline material upgrade           $100,000        Upgrade cost to high density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe
Pump Station at Munster             $625,000     (See Fig 1)
Lagoon Decommissioning            $300,000      ($100,000 /cell X3) - at Munster
Spray Field decommissioning        $100,000      (at Munster)
New Lagoon construction            $200,000      (at Munster)
Trucking of sewage                     $650,000      (Counting on winter ’04/05 – multiply figure by each added year)
Traffic Control                                    $570,000      (During construction) (See Fig 2)
Perth St. and Cockburn work       $4,000,000    (Excavation around existing services, storm/leak drainage and road repair.
    (Ref: Project #900700 -Dft. Budget)                               Cost revised upward to reflect actual cost of Fortune St., at half the distance.)
Extra rock excavation                  $600,000      (?) (One of the biggest unknowns as per RV Anderson Report:
                                                                                             Could easily become $1,600,000)
Trenching & wall support costs    $1,500,000    (?) (See Fig 3)
H2S control vents, valves & fittings $100,000      (Required every kilometer –as stated at Dec 9, 2003 Open House)
Franktown Road repair                $2,000,000    (?) (See Fig 4) (Asphalt, granulars, TCPL-gas utility crossing, etc.)
Richmond Fen crossing                     $1,700,000    (See Fig 5)
Booster station                           $2,500,000 (?) (In 2003-2004 Budget, but left out of costing.)
Bio-scrubber (in Richmond)             $600,000      (?) (To handle Munster’s septic sewage) (See Fig 6)
Jock River Crossing (at Cockburn)      $100,000
                                                                ===========
                                          Total:     $19,645,000

Additional Operation and Maintenance Costs – (Forcemain Option)

Sewage Treatment Costs: $132,000 / year* (@ .60/m³ X 220,000m³ of sewage) – Munster sewage only.
This cost was omitted from the city’s O&M estimates.)

* (Does not include calculation of the transportation costs of Munster's sewage, through approximately seventy kilometers
     of pipe, and through seven (or more) pump/lift stations, to ROPEC, for treatment. When one considers that the lifetime of
     the Glen Cairn Trunk was shortened to 26-years because of the corrosive effects of "septic sewage", from Stittsville and
     Richmond, then it can be clearly determined that there are significant "downstream transportation cost". Project engineers
     for the city prefer to ignore these costs. )

* (Does not include adjustments for the city's hydro cost estimates, which were far too low for the forcemain option, and
artificially inflated for the mechanical treatment option.)

Additional Hidden Costs – (Forcemain Option)

Not listed above – additional costs    (possible millions of dollars) – Note: Not a fixed-price bid, as communal bids were.
Litigation (re: RFP, etc):                        (possible millions of dollars)
Post-installation mitigation work        (possibly millions of dollars) – Note: Glen Cairn collector lasted only ~26 years.
Pipeline Ruptures:
               Repair & Cleanups                 (certain millions of dollars)
               Litigation re: ruptures            (certain millions of dollars)
               (High potential for high health costs, and loss of human life, exist from riskier forcemain option. The Richmond
               Village Association asked for a comparative Risk Assessment to be done, but city deliberately omitted it from the RV
               Anderson Work Plan. Potential litigation against those responsible, five years from now, will not replace a lost life.)

1.) The (Feb 11/04) Draft Budget …an exercise in political trickery:

The Draft Budget “hides” costs of anywhere from $15,000,000 to more than $30,000,000 on the proposed Munster-Richmond pipeline project. Councilors and the public have no way of tracing the true project-cost, unless city staff reveals the breakdown costs on all the relevant project codes (in the left-hand column of the budget review). (See example list in red below.) Until budgets list specific projects in a manner that includes their complete component costs, city budgets will remain out of control.

For example:

Munster-to-Richmond pipeline cost is spread over multiple known and unknown Project Numbers

*Note: Difference between $10,473,613 (immediately above) and the more accurate list of $19,645,000 (shown further up this page), is either missing entirely from the Draft Budget, or is buried in any number of other related-sounding projects ---worth over $140,000,000---such as those shown below:

(Additional costs of $9,000,000 or $19,000,000 could easily be hidden in the above projects, and both the public and the Councillors would have no way to trace the real cost of the forcemain, without project-specific listing of total costs.)
Repeated request to city staff for breakdowns of the above-listed budget items have been ignored.

#900221: Munster Lagoons Rehabilitation - $12,642,000: More than half of this budget has already been wasted on repeat studies, sewage hauling, and patch work, without a solution even being started. The remaining $4,991,922 would more than cover the total cost of a communal treatment system, (that three out of the four consulting engineers recommended), but would not begin to pay the cost $18,000,000-PLUS cost of a sewage forcemain system.

#900235: Richmond Pumping Station Upgrade - $1,5030,000: This is the work that the city said it never did.

#902566 & 902964: Rehabilitation of existing sewer pipes in Richmond: $275,000 + $275,000. Would not be done if not to help increase performance in dealing with Munster inflow.

#902964: Performance monitoring - $675,000. Perth St. wastewater collection and conveyance monitoring along forcemain route area of Perth Street, extended to Shea Rd.

#900700: Fortune St. (Perth St to Jock River) - $2,000,000: Fortune Street was excavated to pipeline depth, and reconstructed to handle gravity conveyance of Munster’s sewage, if that considered option had been chosen. It was not. The main point of interest, in this case, is that the same detail of work would have to be done on the selected route of Perth Street and Cockburn St, and at twice the distance, the cost would be in the neighbourhood of $4,000,000. (Is this item buried somewhere in the “red list”, above?)

#??????: Where is the Booster Station - $2,500,000 buried? - (proclaimed by the city to be in the 2003-2004 Budgets?)

#??????: Where is the Bio-Scrubber - $600,000-plus buried? - (proclaimed by the city to be in the 2004 Budget?)

Final Comment on the 2004 Draft Budget is best expressed by Mark Sutcliffe:
Ottawa entrepreneur, business journalist and broadcaster (heard weekdays on CFRA), states in his Ottawa Citizen article of February 14, 2004:

2.) Remember? - RVAnderson rejected the pipeline on the basis of its higher cost.
The RV Anderson report (December 16, 2000) rejected the pipeline alternative ---in favour of either of the communal alternatives--- on the basis of the pipeline’s higher known and additional unknown costs:

"Of the three alternatives the pipeline has the highest cost and the highest
risk for cost escalation (due to unknown issues like rock quantities)."

The public is still confused by the city’s, “added cost for added risk”-approach.

3.) Need for Independent Auditor of city’s activities
There have been numerous high-level calls for an independent city auditor to publicly address the numerous hidden abuses of the public purse. Had this been in place prior to the $50,000,000 Ottawa South Collector boondoggle/fiasco/scandal, it would have prevented some of the same city-players (including the current Mayor/former Regional Chair), from repeating the scandal at Munster.

An annual increase in taxes, matched to the cost of living index would make sense ---ONLY--- after the city of Ottawa has put an Independent Auditor in place. So far, the requests have gone unfulfilled ---giving the impression that the city has a lot to hide.

4.) Where is the city’s Internal Auditor’s Report?
The city's auditor, Tracy McTaggart, was commissioned to do an internal audit of the Munster wastewater project in the Spring of 2003, for release in September of 2003. This report has been delayed, presumably because of what it may contain. The city will be seen to be acting directly counter to the public interest, if goes ahead with construction of the pipeline, before this report is publicly tabled and considered in the cost analysis. (The city is already seen as acting against the public interest on the health risk issue.)

The Environmental Assessment Process, (see excerpts of the EA Act), requires that documentation,
---including clear costing information--- in support a particular rationale, must be easily traceable, and be seen to be traceable in an open and transparently way. Since the city has already applied for a C of A for the pipeline alternative, it would indicate that the city is already trying to renege on it fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers ---given the bleak cost figures for that option.

5.) Placing Richmond's shallow aquifer at risk ---with a pressurized sewage
forcemain--- may cost far more than a squandered $12,000,000 to $15,000,000:

Pipeline and Additional Capital Costs - (Forcemain Option)

Additional Operation and Maintenance Costs – (Forcemain Option)

Additional Hidden Costs – (Forcemain Option)

1.) The (Feb 11/04) Draft Budget …an exercise in political trickery:

For example:

Munster-to-Richmond pipeline cost is spread over multiple known and unknown Project Numbers

PROJECT CODE

DESCRIPTION

BUDGET

EXPENDITURES & COMMITTMENTS

UNSPENT & UNCOMMITTED

#900221

Mnstr. Lagn. Rehab.

$12,642,000

$7,650,078

$4,991,922

#900235

Rchmd PmpStn.Upgr

$1,500,000

$1,243,309

$286,691

#902566

Rchmd Sewer rehab

$275,000

-

$275,000

#902964

Rchmd Sewer rehab

$275,000

-

$275,000

#902964

Perth St. monitoring.

$675,000

-

$675,000

(Ref: #900700) x2

Perth/Cockburn Wk

$4,000,000

-

$4,000,000

==========

==========

TOTAL:

$19,367,000

$10,473,613*

*Note: Difference between $10,473,613 (immediately above) and the more accurate list of $19,645,000 (shown further up this page), is either missing entirely from the Draft Budget, or is buried in any number of other related-sounding projects ---worth over $140,000,000---such as those shown below:

#900235: Richmond Pumping Station Upgrade - $1,5030,000: This is the work that the city said it never did.