Minister defends no- bid consulting contract
B. C.’ s transportation minister is defending a decision to directly award a $ 350,000 taxpayer- paid consulting contract, saying it would have taken too long to put the work to the public in a normal bidding process.
Claire Trevena said an open competition for the contract to review transportation solutions at the Massey tunnel crossing would have meant work couldn’t begin until January.
“We wanted to make sure we could move on this as soon as possible,” Trevena said Thursday. “If we’d done a B. C. Bid process, going open, it would have taken several months to put together the passage, put it out to B. C., let different organizations come and individuals come, bid on it and then go through this.”
Trevena announced Wednesday her government had hired Stan Cowdell, president of Westmar Project Advisors, to examine whether the aging Massey tunnel is seismically safe and if it should be twinned or replaced by a bridge. The review will cost up to $ 1 million, with Cowdell’s contract worth $ 350,000 with an additional $ 650,000 available to hire specialists in engineering, seismology and bridge and tunnel design where required.
Trevena in September cancelled the previous government’s plan for a 10- lane bridge to replace the tunnel, on the South Arm of the Fraser River between Delta and Richmond, saying she’d launch a review of alternatives. On Tuesday, she faced questions from the opposition for having no terms of reference on the review two months later, and no one appointed to do the work. On Wednesday, she abruptly announced Cowdell’s appointment and his terms.
Liberal critic Ian Paton called the project “rushed, very political and redundant” because the previous government had completed several studies of tunnel replacement options.
“It’s been reviewed to death as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
Paton said he disliked Trevena awarding the contract directly, but doesn’t have an issue with who received it. “I think we’d like to see it go out to a publicly tendered contract. But I’ve heard from one of my fellow MLAs that he thought the ( recipient) was a pretty upstanding company.”
Trevena argued her ministry did its due diligence before selecting Cowdell, even if the process wasn’t public.
“The ministry canvassed widely — talking with the Ministry of Finance, Association of Consulting Engineers, and various others — put together a list of more than two dozen companies and individuals who could do this job, and then went through to make sure we got a good significant number who hadn’t had involvement with the Massey project before, and came up with Cowdell, who is a very professional engineer,” she said. “We have great faith in what he’s going to be doing.”
Cowdell does not appear to have close ties to the B. C. New Democrats. Elections B. C. records show he and his company donated $ 13,350 to the B. C. Liberal party between 2005 and 2016.