Engineers have performed the final mechanical inspection of the newly built Quyon Community Centre, but Municipality of Pontiac Mayor Joanne Labadie still has concerns.

The $1.5 million project has been plagued with delays and disputes between the municipality and the contractor.

“I was present for the final inspection of the building and there were many, many problems with it,” Labadie said. “The contractors think they have delivered a perfect building and there are still many issues with it that we brought up.”

Labadie said the municipality’s lawyer is still negotiating with the project’s architect to determine who is responsible for certain issues.

She said that the municipality’s lawyers are recommending that a third party engineering report be completed before the municipality takes over the building.

One of the issues was the roof.

After the architect, Pierre Tabet, got the contract for the job, the specialized trusses that were designed for the roof could not be manufactured by anyone in Quebec. As a result, Tabet had to redesign the roof.

Labadie said there are several issues that could be related to the new roof, but a third party inspection would determine that with certainty.

Another major issue was the fact that the project had no professional engineer overseeing the work, which started when the old community centre was demolished in October 2017. Labadie said that when the project started, two elected officials were overseeing it on behalf of the municipality.

“There was no project manager assigned to the building,” Labadie said. “We’ve hired an architect to oversee it on our behalf but there was nobody designated within the municipality to be the superintendant of the project.”

Labadie was elected in November 2017, at which point former Director General Benedikt Kuhn tasked Assistant Director General Dominic Labrie with the role of project supervisor. Since Labrie’s departure last year, the municipality has hired a consultant to take over as project manager.

Asked whether it was standard practice for a municipality to appoint elected officials to oversee public works projects, Labadie said no.

“You always have to have someone inside your organization overseeing your contractors,” she said. “It was my view that that is not the role of a politician to manage a capital project.”

Not only did the last council fail to ensure there was a project manager, there was no contingency budget built into the project.

“[That] struck me as being really odd,” Labadie said. “It ended up becoming very problematic.”

She said when she was with the Western Quebec School Board, any capital projects had to have a 10 per cent contingency budget.

“This one was $1.5 million, point finale, no contingency budget,” Labadie said.

Labadie said that with a project of this scale, there was bound to be some surprises.

One of those surprises was when the municipality was approached by the construction firm, CIMA construction, for additional funds to deal with “winter conditions.”

Representatives from CIMA did not respond for comment.

“There were a lot of things the contractor wanted us to pay that were unreasonable,” Labadie said. “[It’s] a project that starts in October and is supposed to finish in February, and immediately out of the hack they asked for $50,000 to cover the winter conditions. We said ‘well you bid on a contract to build a building through the winter, that should have costed into your proposal.’”

Labadie admitted that although the temperatures dropped early in 2017, the municipality felt it was an unreasonable request by CIMA.

“When you bid to construct a building of that size in winter, you have to know that you’re going to have to heat it.”

With a fixed budget of $1.5 million and the municipality refusing to pay the extra $50,000, Labadie said CIMA decided to slow the pace of work.

“The only protest they had was to slow down or just not be there at all for a while,” she said.

To make matters worse, the area around the community centre flooded in the spring, which made it difficult for contractors to even access the building.

While the building itself is out of the flood zone, the area surrounding it is not.

Although Labadie said in December of last year that the municipality expected to take over the building before the new year, the municipality is still waiting.

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