A Victoria resident, with extensive experience in public infrastructure projects, expresses alarm over discrepancies between reported costs and information provided on the Crystal Pool replacement project. The commentary highlights the lack of detail regarding potential hidden costs, environmental assessments, and procurement strategies, raising questions about the project's feasibility and transparency.
As a professional engineer with 35 years experience of leading the planning, design, procurement and construction of major public infrastructure projects including 18 schools, a major regional hospital, a cancer centre, numerous river crossings, highway interchanges and urban freeways worth billions of dollars, I am alarmed by the major inconsistencies between the reports provided to Victoria council on the Crystal Pool replacement and the information provided by the city’s communication staff...
The June 7, 2024 staff report to council states “…..cost certainty will only be achieved once the design is complete, the work has been tendered, and construction contracts are secured”.The feasibility study only did a visual condition inspection of the existing facility. It did not look behind the walls.
The planning for projects of this nature typically use a quantitive probabilistic risk analysis of cost and schedule. The Project Management Institute says a Monte Carlo simulation or similar technique is used to convert project risks into numerical information that is used to determine the cost and time contingencies of the project.
Furthermore, there is no mention of the annual capital maintenance and renewal costs for the new pool. For a building of this nature they will be about five per cent of the initial capital cost, i.e. $10 million a year or $300 million over the life of the facility, also to be paid for by Victoria taxpayers.
The feasibility study states that there are three appendices to the report, but only two are included in the publicly available version.
Crystal Pool Victoria Infrastructure Cost Overruns Project Management
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