The media — and The Examiner is no exception — typically run stories whenever a government construction project doesn’t meet its estimated completion date or exceeds its allotted budget. We may have to rethink this practice because it’s become so commonplace, it’s really no longer news.
The latest example is the Capitol Visitor Center, which is already two and a half years behind schedule and more than $335 million over its original $265 million budget, according to the Government Accountability Office. Of that amount, $71.5 million was added after Sept. 11, 2001, for security enhancements. And the CVC is still not done.
The underground 580,000-square-foot center on the east side of the U.S. Capitol will include theaters, an exhibition hall, gift shops, a 600-seat cafeteria and lots of restrooms — all welcome amenities. But similar structures are built in the private sector every day under equally challenging conditions without 80 percent cost overruns and multi-year delays.
The Fairfax-based Mid Atlantic Division of Centex Construction Co. completed Phase I excavation and major structural construction in July 2005. This included erecting foundation walls, steel support columns, some utility work, pouring the roof slab, adding a moisture barrier below the water table and building a new service tunnel.
Many of the missed deadlines since then have been blamed on problems with Phase 2 interior work involving air ducts and a fire alarm system — which under the contract were supposed to have been completed by Sept. 15. Suffice it to say that few private clients reward contractors who stop work for more than four months because the custom light fixtures they ordered haven’t been delivered. Remaining problems in five “near-critical” areas still threaten to delay the CVC project even more, according to GAO.
“There is a risk that, without negative consequences, the resolve of some major stakeholders to complete the project in a timely and efficient manner could be adversely affected,” GAO director Bernard Ungar noted. Negative consequences in the form of steep fines for missed deadlines should have already discouraged any preventable dallying and dallying that drives up costs, especially when there’s reasonable concern that the extended fall 2007 deadline will also be missed.
Phase 2 contractor Manhattan Holdings Inc. blames Congress for continually adding stuff to the original design. But Ungar told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee last month that the contractor wasn’t adequately supervising its subcontractors. Whoever’s at fault here, taxpayers will still wind up paying almost double the estimated cost.
Not every problem that pops up during a construction project can be anticipated, but no projects would ever get built if the people writing the checks didn’t have a reasonably firm expectation of when they’d be finished — and for how much. No bank would even loan money to remodel a humble kitchen based on such open-ended parameters. The government shouldn’t accept them, either.
