The Plante administration is calling on the builder of its new compost plants to respect its deadlines, while the official opposition is concerned about potential delays.
Opposition elected official Alan DeSousa reported Monday to the municipal council that the Saint-Laurent composting center, which is due to open in the coming months, has still not received the computer equipment which constitutes the “brains” of the ‘factory. The Press has already reported that a dispute remained between the company responsible for supplying this equipment and the multinational Veolia, charged by Montreal with building these facilities.
“We could see that the control room was empty. There was a lack of computers and equipment that seem essential to me,” lamented Mr. DeSousa, after being able to visit the Saint-Laurent factory.
Marie-Andrée Mauger, responsible for the Environment on the executive committee, was reassuring.
“Veolia is committed to starting to treat organic materials with compost at the St-Laurent CT in the first half of 2024, so to date they are following their deadlines,” she said. “We have a contractual agreement, we have written in black and white our expectations and the new deadlines. Our message to Veolia is to respect these new parameters. »
As for the possibility that the City of Montreal will still have to pay additional sums to complete the project, Mr.me Mauger said his teams are doing everything to avoid this possibility. “We do everything to stick to it [à l’enveloppe] and we really don’t want to come back to council to increase these amounts,” she said.
The saga of Montreal’s compost plants has been going on for years. The two construction sites were paralyzed for 10 months, until last spring, due to a disagreement between the City of Montreal, Veolia and the contractor EBC.
The City of Montreal reached an agreement last May with Veolia, after increasing the project budget by more than 40 million and agreeing to waive charging 5.4 million in late fees.
The total factory construction budget now exceeds 360 million.
In 2021, the Auditor General of Montreal mentioned a “global observation of cost overruns and non-compliance with the schedule” in the file of the organic materials processing centers (CTMO). “The CTMO construction project was not carried out following a sufficiently rigorous process that should be expected for a project of such complexity and scope,” she wrote.