City hall’s brazen financial trickery fooling nobody

If you want to see a clumsy magic act — and who doesn’t? — watch as millions of dollars disappear from City of Saskatoon projects.

It resembles someone performing a card trick while hidden cards drop repeatedly from his sleeve. Nobody’s fooled except those who fail to pay attention.

Take a recent city report on Saskatoon’s proposed bus rapid transit system. Those who followed the plans to improve Saskatoon’s transit system may have been surprised to see the system will cost only $120 million to build.

Actually, that’s $120 million, plus or minus $30 million, according to the city’s consultant.

That sounds magically cheap compared to what bus rapid transit systems have cost in other Canadian cities like London or Winnipeg, where they total in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

It seems suspiciously low compared to figures released by Saskatoon city hall, too.

It turns out that $120-million total doesn’t include the cost of mitigating the impact of railway crossing delays, which is pegged at $150 million. And, really, $150 million is probably conservative.

Finding a way around rail lines that could turn a bus rapid transit system into a bus waiting system seems crucial to the entire concept. This was pointed out by politicians on city council’s transportation committee last week.

Those wondering how bus rapid transit and railways crossings can coexist were not enlightened by the most recent update.

Barring a miracle move on the part of the railways to relocate their lines outside the city, estimated to cost billions of dollars, that pretty much leaves building expensive underpasses and overpasses.

When the city announced it was looking for federal transit infrastructure money, interestingly, a $280-million estimate for the system was used.

Now, if you add the $150 million to solve rail delays to the high estimate for the cost to build the bus rapid transit system, $120 million plus $30 million, you get $300 million. Ta-dah!

No wonder city hall likes using the smaller number — at least with residents — as it pursues federal infrastructure dollars with tight deadlines. Less money is an easier sell, especially in a city where transit use is estimated at about 4.5 per cent in the city’s own documents.

So when you’re trying to sell mega-project-weary residents, use a smaller number, but when you’re looking for money from a higher level of government, use the bigger number.

Incidentally, the original cost for the bus rapid transit system, dating back two years ago when it was introduced as the central plank of the city’s growth plan, was estimated at $44 million to $66 million.

The more controversial the project, the greater the temptation to divide the cost up and cite certain parts to make the project look less expensive.

When the city awarded the $76.8-million contract to build the Remai Modern Art Gallery of Saskatchewan in 2013, the cost had already risen more than $20 million above the original estimate.

So a March 2013 city report cites “three distinct projects,” even though they were all being built by the same contractor as part of the same contract. These three projects were the gallery itself for $59.5 million, the parkade underneath that gallery for $16.6 million and improvements to adjacent Persephone Theatre for $663,000.

The same report backs excluding the $2.39-million cost of the city land on which the gallery was to be built from the project cost.

So, as the cost of building the gallery ballooned to more than $104 million, politicians and administrators have mostly touted the cost of the gallery alone. That has allowed some to cling to the smaller $84.63 million number and avoid talking about the $100-million threshold that includes the now $19.5-million parkade.

This makes sense to people who don’t consider their garages to be part of their houses. Maybe the city could lower the cost of the bridges it’s building by not including the piers on which the bridges are built.

What has the city accomplished with its gallery numbers? It has created a lot of confusion over what the gallery actually cost.

But, as with a bad magic trick, nobody who has been paying attention was fooled.