Public Updated On Hospital Project

A small but interested group of citizens showed up for the North Bay Regional Health Centre project public update session at the Capitol Centre Wednesday.

Hospital official Mark Hurst, MPP Monique Smith and John McKendrick, Senior Vice-President, Project Delivery for Infrastructure Ontario all stressed the magnitude and complexity of the project. McKendrick sites the Thunder Bay and Sudbury Hospital projects as prime examples of why there is the need to have everything in place before construction begins.

“This is a leading edge state of the art hospital and it very complex facility it takes good planning and a lot of time to get it right,” explains McKendrick.

“Over the summer we’ve been getting asked a lot of questions about the bidders, they’ve been doing a lot of due diligence, they’ve requested some extensions because it is a complex project. We’re not going to rush into that, we’re going to take the time to do it right because we want to make sure that this facility is built properly.”

McKendrick also explained that the winning bidder will be held accountable for the quality of the building for the next 30 years, therefore, they want to get it right from the start.

“First of all because you have private financing involved the bidders are at risk, they do a lot more due diligence on the contracts, we transferred a lot more risk over to the contractors.”

“And then even after you get into the construction stage, because the contractors have borrowed the money their lenders are constantly on them to make sure that they meet their deadlines otherwise the hospital doesn’t pay, and if the hospital doesn’t pay the contractor then the lenders don’t get paid.”

MPP Monique Smith supported McKendrick’s analysis of the situation using the saying ‘measure twice, cut once.”

“Obviously there is some concern that the project is not moving along as quickly as we’d like and I thought it was important for the community to hear from Infrastructure Ontario and to hear why,” states Smith.

“People have a lot of questions and I think it was really important that we open it up to the community and allow all of the questions to be answered.”

Smith said she was happy that McKendrick was able to give detailed analysis of project to date and moving forward.

“We want to make sure that we have all of the details outlined and that our bidders understand exactly what they’re bidding on, that we have no surprised down the road.”

“You have to keep in mind that this new process they will be bidding on a complete package and so that bid price is what they will be kept to, so it obviously in their interest to make sure that they have all the answers that they need.”

McKendrick said the meeting and his presence in the Bay were not measures of ‘political spin doctors’at work.

“I can tell you that we have a definite close date for the RFP it’s October 19th , then we expect to announce the winning bidder in November, and we expect construction to start in March if not sooner.”

Completion of construction on the project is expected by January 2010.