The NWT government says it is learning lessons after a southern contractor’s difficulties led to a significant overspend on modular buildings for Colville Lake’s school.
The modulars arrived in the Sahtu community in March, after a two-year delay, and began welcoming students this academic year. The school’s principal has said they will make a huge difference to capacity and provide more – and quieter – learning spaces.
Several times a year, the GNWT produces documents for MLAs’ approval that set out unexpected spending across the government. This week, the latest set of those documents showed just under $1.6 million in extra funding for the modulars, bringing the total project budget to about $6.7 million.
Finance minister Caroline Wawzonek said the delay getting the modulars built and shipped accounted for a “fairly substantial amount” of that overspend.
Asked by Great Slave MLA Kate Reid about the nature of that delay, Wawzonek said the southern company contracted to deliver the modulars was not able to build them to school-grade specifications “in a timely fashion” and had an inadequate plan to ship them to Colville Lake, which is reachable only by air or winter road.
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“There was certainly a review done of what went wrong in that procurement process,” Wawzonek told Reid.
“The plan they had put in place – or that they thought they had in place – to transport a modular school into a region in the Northwest Territories was also not adequately planned out.
“Staff from Infrastructure who are more familiar were able to step in and support getting the modulars where they needed to go.”
Wawzonek said the delay was so long that “the costs budgeted initially were no longer the costs by the time the project was delivered.”
The minister said improvements being made to procurement processes are designed to avoid “the same specific situation with a supplier” and establish “contract expectations and consequences if the expectations are not being met.”
Sahtu MLA Danny McNeely previously described the new additions to the school’s campus as an interim solution until an entirely new school can be built. The school’s existing building has long been described as inadequate.
