Wonder and desolation in the Rosemont metro

I am seriously considering buying a plane ticket to visit the Highlands in Scotland.

I’ll see the Loch Ness monster there, I’m sure.

There are miracles.

I saw it with my own eyes on Monday.

Get ready to fall off your chair: a big project has just launched in Montreal.

You read that right.

The Office Municipal d’Habitation de Montréal (OMHM) has managed to meet its 2019 budget of $112 million to build a new 10-storey building directly above the Rosemont metro station.

Plan announced before and after pandemic inflammationBoth reasons are now used as a universal description for all construction sites, thus exploding the nest.

The OMHM building houses offices and 193 apartments for low-income seniors. They’ve already started moving, like 82-year-old Giselle Germain, who showed us around her one-bedroom apartment.

It was delightful and heartwarming to see her welcome all who came to her beautiful little home.

OMHM’s Executive Director, Daniel Cecil, urged the audience to respect the budget envelope during his address to an audience full of politicians of all stripes.

This thing is so rare that it deserves to be highlighted with a fluorescent marker.

On the sidelines of the event, he told me that the budget had to come in below the projected 112 million.

I was thinking of buying my ticket to Scotland at the same time “6/49”.

There was hope in this announcement, but also a sad humor.

Visible three corners from the new OMHM building is one of the city’s most lopsided projects in recent memory: the Bellechasse Transportation Center of the Société de transport de Montreal (STM).

This project is fascinating for all the wrong reasons.

First it costs: 584 million.

That’s more than double the $254 million bill announced in 2017, and the increase isn’t over yet. Millions more will be added to the site, I learn, to buy equipment intended to maintain and recharge electric buses.

For comparison, here’s what you can buy in Montreal today for half a billion dollars:

For the Broccolini Group, this amount would have made possible the construction of the National Bank’s new headquarters, a 40-story building.

For plant management, this refers to all sums earmarked for the purchase of buildings and land over the next decade.

For HEC Montreal, quite simply, it is less than half the total cost of its new campus of 235 million in the business district.

In short, the bill for the STM garage is frankly incomprehensible.

STM’s new director general, Marie-Claude Leonard, admitted in an interview that many “lessons” had already been learned from the project.

The main thing is that the planning phase cannot be skipped.

In this case, because the soil test was carried out quickly, the peeling of the rock could not be detected. This defect became a major safety problem during construction.

Sources familiar with the matter said the plant’s management condemned the “political instrumentalisation” of the STM, which in 2018 demanded a change of concept so that the garage would become partly underground.

The citations for this new edition were hastily prepared, these sources tell me.

Project management tightened along the way, but the damage was already done. The only thing the STM can do is adapt its practices for the future, Marie-Claude Leonard recognizes. Specifically for the extension of the Blue Line, it will be piloted by 2029.

There will also be lessons or learnings to be learned from OMHM’s neighboring project.

Its gestation period has been long – it was first proposed in 2011 – but OMHM has invested considerable effort – and a $4 million special budget – to ensure close monitoring of costs throughout the project.

The executive director of the organization thinks to do a proper review and maybe some people should take notes. This is a rare example of a public project that respects the budget and is worthy of study.

I ended my day with a tour of Montreal City Hall’s Titanic reconstruction site. The bill has risen again by 28.5 million and will cross 210 million, we learn.

As one message always chases another in the wonderful world of information.