Jake's View | Contractors keep bilking us for billions in cost overruns because they can
Government should revise the way it handles revenue from land sales, otherwise public works contractors will keep taking us to the cleaners
The Civic Party’s Jeremy Tam Man-ho would not say whether he would back or reject the funding request [for the cost overrun in the Shatin to Central Link], saying he had insufficient information.
“We need to know the exact breakdown of the cost overrun rather than a lump sum,” he said.
SCMP, December 6
Now that’s what I call not seeing the forest for the trees. Does Jeremy Tam really believe that listening to excuses in detail for yet another huge cost overrun will reveal what is fundamentally wrong with our public transport projects?
I can already tell him what these excuses will be. Wage inflation has been high, archaeologists have insisted on prior dirt-scratching rights along the route of the Shatin to Central Link and the government has not released land when it said it would.
This is all true, and largely predictable, and the engineers made no provision for it in their budgets. They knew they could bid low and plead cost overruns later, as they have always done.
They knew it because they knew that with the project well underway the Legislative Council would have no choice but to cough up the money, whatever the excuse.
What are Jeremy Tam and his colleagues otherwise to do? Can they really tell the contractors walk away, leaving empty tunnels and building sites to grow weeds or become storage sites for rusting containers? Once you start a project like this you have to finish it or kiss good-bye to every dollar you have already spent.
