City ready to hire a host of consultants to oversee LRT construction
Posting calls for many experts at pay rates reflecting their technical skills
Ottawa’s light-rail project is supposed to include a lot of work for local companies, including millions of dollars for a small army of consultants the city is hiring to manage its relationships with the Rideau Transit Group.
The consortium has won the $3.8-billion contract to design, build, finance and maintain the rail line through downtown, and now the real work begins, with technical demands that the city’s 28-person “rail implementation office” isn’t up to.
So, with a public posting Thursday, the city set about looking for experts in 23 areas, including 14 “project leads” for everything from structural engineering to managing property needed for the construction work. Another nine technical specialists are needed for jobs such as monitoring noise and vibration and dealing with ground and rain water.
They’re high-end positions: The project leads will all be responsible for making sure the construction consortium lives up to the terms of its massive contract, and the city wants each of the technical specialists to have at least 15 years’ experience. There’s also a lot of money to be made: the posting on the popular government procurement board MERX says the city expects to spend up to $3 million a year on these services, with individual assignments worth up to $250,000 at a time.
The Citizen asked about the wisdom of using so many consultants in senior jobs on the city’s most important construction project ever, and rail director John Jensen answered by email: “If called up under a standing offer, these pre-qualified experts/advisers will always be under the direction of and reporting to City staff who are responsible for ensuring that the Rideau Transit Group (RTG) is living up to its contractual obligations,” he wrote.
“The Rail Implementation Office (RIO) uses a number of different personnel resources to advance the Confederation Line project, including permanent City staff, temporary City staff and consultants,” Jensen added. “Typically, consultants are used to bring in specific expertise that is required for only short periods of time or to access expertise that is not available within the City.”
The posting says the idea is to establish a list of qualified contractors the city can use as it needs them, with initial terms for the standing offers of at least two years and the option of three more — to the expected end of the LRT construction project in 2018 — if both parties agree. Jensen pointed out that nobody would necessarily work all that time, just that the rates for their services would be valid that long.
The city has relied heavily on consultants for the project so far, with hundreds of thousands of dollars going to the Boxfish Group, led by Mayor Jim Watson’s confidant Brian Guest, to guide the planning of the 12.5-kilometre route. When RTG was presented as the winning bidder, Jensen said the project couldn’t have got that far without Guest.