MMM Group:

Consultants, builders share Hwy. 417 work

Clearing up any name confusion,

The transportation consulting firm that designed the impending expansion of Hwy. 417 is part of the consortium that will build it, a situation the company found itself in when the city and provincial government abruptly rolled that work into Ottawa’s light rail project.

For years, the well-known consultancy McCormick Rankin had been working for the Ministry of Transportation on plans to widen the Queensway between Nicholas Street and the split with Hwy. 174. At the same time, the construction and engineering management firm MMM Group was part of the Rideau Transit Group consortium, which was bidding on the city’s multibillion-dollar rail project.

The twist: McCormick Rankin and MMM Group are the same company, the result of a merger in 2008. They keep separate names only for marketing purposes because they’re well known in their industries, said Dave Jull, MMM Group’s executive vicepresident of transportation.

“We’re not trying to be cute about anything,” he said. “We’re one company and we act that way.”

Ordinarily, it would be problematic for the same company to design a project for a government client and then join in the bidding for the construction, which was the position created when the transportation ministry and the city decided a year ago to combine the highway and rail projects so they could be scheduled together and produce less traffic chaos.

Infrastructure Ontario, the agency in charge of the rail and highway procurement, didn’t return two days of calls from the Citizen about how it handled the problem.

Ottawa West-Nepean MPP Bob Chiarelli, recently named energy minister by new Premier Kathleen Wynne, was the infrastructure minister at the time. Approached at City Hall while promoting a basketball tournament, he said he wasn’t familiar with the fine details of the procurement but had total confidence in Infrastructure Ontario’s competence.

“They’re seen as leaders in procurement globally,” Chiarelli said.

MMM isn’t one of the toptier partners in the Rideau Transit Group, but it is a major contractor.

The company had to shift gears suddenly in an attempt to keep parts of its business separate so there’d be no “cross-pollination” between the groups working on two parts of the project.

The design and the bidding jobs were handled in separate offices, Jull said, and the McCormick Rankin arm of the company handed over complete designs to the transportation ministry so that all three of the finalist bid teams got exactly the same information.

The highway project — worth about $200 million, compared with the $1.8 billion contract for rail — is to begin this winter.