City staff are asking councillors for an extra $15.5 million for one piece of the Red Hill Creek Expressway. In a report going to the Public Works committee tomorrow morning, Red Hill project manager Chris Murray says the lowest bid for the Barton to Brampton Street section of the project came in at 33% higher than expected.

Staff had expected this part of the project would cost $46.5 million, but the Dufferin Construction bid is $62 million. At least half of the increase is associated with the excavation of the toxic Rennie Street closed landfill, a PCB-laced dump that netted the city a $458,000 fine in 2000 after Hamilton officials pleaded guilty to charges of knowingly allowing it to leak toxic materials into Red Hill Creek.

During the court-ordered cleanup of the site, city officials and their consultants rejected neighbourhood pleas to remove the dump. Residents were told it was unsafe to dig into the toxic waste during the $11 million remediation completed last year.

Now the city is planning to excavate 70,000 tonnes of the landfill and truck it away. An uncertain amount of the material can only be delivered to a toxic waste facility. Dufferin's price for the dump excavation is 75% higher than expected.

Part of the reason for the increase is that Dufferin's expectation that the portion of PCB-contaminated waste will be higher than previously calculated. They also expect to pay a higher price per tonne for disposal of other parts of the landfill.

The staff report also discloses that the expected cost of the interchange at the QEW has jumped by $40 million in the past two years. This portion of the project is being paid for by the Dalton McGuinty government.

The report says: " In a recent letter (June 2004) from the Minister of Transportation (the Honourable Harinder Takhar) to Mayor DiIanni, the Province revealed costs to construct the QEW/Expressway interchange have increased by more than double. The projected costs for these works at the QEW were estimated in November 2002 at approximately $60 million and the Province has now budgeted $100 million for same."

The interchange work had originally been costed at $40 million. The steep increase means that the total cost of the north-south expressway now stands at $323 million. The staff report can be viewed at
http://www.city.hamilton.on.ca/Clerk/
agendas-minutes-reports/public-works/
2004/Oct04/PW04111.pdf.