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New Yorkers will pay price for Croton Water Treatment Plant cost overruns
The price tag of a new Bronx water treatment plant has skyrocketed to $3.4 billion – nearly three times what the Bloomberg administration announced when construction began in 2004, the city’s Independent Budget Office says.
The astounding cost overruns for the Croton Water Treatment Plant mean that every New York City household will end up paying, on average, $44 more in its annual water bill for the next few decades just to pay for the plant.
And although city officials keep coming up with cash for the contractors in charge of this money pit, they have yet to produce all the parks improvements they promised Bronx residents in exchange for erecting the new plant in Van Cortlandt Park.
Mayor Bloomberg promised in a 2004 memorandum of understanding with city and state leaders that the Department of Environmental Protection would earmark $200 million over a five year-period from the Croton project’s budget to pay for boroughwide park improvements.
Only $150 million of that money has been committed, Parks Department spokeswoman Vickie Karp said yesterday.
The Independent Budget Office said the city doesn’t plan to spend the rest of the $50 million until 2019.
Somehow, a five-year promise mysteriously morphed into 15 years.
“I’m so outraged at everything DEP and the city have done here,” said North Bronx neighborhood leader Jane Sokolow. “They keep trampling over a community that didn’t want this project to begin with.”
“All of the Parks [Department] Croton projects have either been built, are in construction, or are in the process of being designed or bid,” Karp insisted.
“The undertaking is a huge success and a huge win for the people of the Bronx.”
Bronx neighborhood leaders see things differently.
They always said the plant, which the city was required to build by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, could be built more cheaply in Westchester County instead of beneath Van Cortlandt Park. But the DEP’s experts insisted the Bronx site would only cost $1.2 billion.
So what went wrong?
“Initially, bidding out the work during a hyper-inflated construction market was the primary reason behind cost increases,” DEP spokesman Farrell Sklerov said yesterday in an email statement.
In 2009, then-city Controller William Thompson audited the project and found it had jumped to $2.1 billion. The original “conceptual cost estimate [by the city] was unreliable,” Thompson concluded.
In other words, the neighborhood people had been right.
Since Thompson’s audit, the plant has swallowed another billion dollars or so.
“More recently, design and construction change orders due to the complexity of the facility, and enhancements to the design and architecture of the above ground facilities all played a role in cost increases,” Sklerov added.
That’s all doublespeak, says Bronx Assemblyman Jeff Dinowitz, a longtime critic of the plant.
“If this was Bloomberg’s own company, he would have fired the people who screwed this up,” Dinowitz said. “But the mayor has not said a word. … Someone needs to take responsibility for such huge waste.”
jgonzalez@nydailynews.com
