Few details are available but it appears an incident last fall at the Woodward Wastewater Treatment Plant has resulted in repairs costing over $3 Million. The plant has been undergoing an extensive rebuild over the last few years.
The city of Hamilton has a policy that requires a quarterly report on purchases made by city staff that don’t follow the normal tendering rules. The policy for Non-competitive Procurements is only to be used in narrowly defined circumstances where it is justified that the policies for the general acquisition process could not be followed-for instance, emergencies.
The biggest one of these involved an incident at the Woodward Avenue Wastewater Treatment Plant where damage occurred to a digester and 50,000 litres of untreated sludge were released. When it was all over a contract for $3,248,709.00 was issued to Maple Reinders Constructors Ltd. for emergency work required to return the digester back to service including structural welding repairs, coatings/insulation and Technical Standards and Safety Authority (TSSA) testing and commissioning assistance. It appears a roof was damaged. Staff have promised an information report with more details.
There were several contract extensions with existing suppliers pending the awarding of a new contract.
Roughly $2.5 million went to a variety of sole-sourced contracts, the explanation provided was that a particular vendor was recommended because it was more cost-effective or beneficial to the City. Such contracts included the purchase of four vehicles from a local Ford dealer for Paramedic services at a cost of $220,000. The transaction was approved to allow the department to take advantage of Police Cooperative Purchasing Group pricing.
Several sole-sourced Information Technology contracts were issued, in most cases because the vendor already had familiarity with the city’s IT systems.
In total, the city issued contracts valued at $7.4 Million in the last three months of 2022 that fell outside of the normal purchasing policy.
This looks like a continuing problem.Really if you inspection if any should be taken on a regular schedule. We see No sign of that process.Much like sewergate silence,lack of inspection charts,maintenance charts etc.Something wrong here.