Construction dispute puts Kuujjuaq in the red

GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS

The long-standing fiasco over Kuujjuaq’s multi-million-dollar town hall is forcing the municipality into a $2.7 million deficit, and jeopardizing a home care program for elders.

Kuujuuaq’s council and administration face tough decisions over how to make up the sizeable shortfall in its $12.2 million budget for 2004.

Administration recently confirmed the hamlet will apply for a long-term debt, a move described by the hamlet’s finance officer as a final measure.

“We don’t have a lot of choice,” said Ian Robertson, the hamlet’s secretary-treasurer. “We have no real way of getting more money.”

Robertson said the community’s finances can’t keep up with essential services such as road maintenance and water treatment because of the expenses left over from the construction of Kuujjuaq’s cultural centre, which doubles as town hall.

Robertson said Kuujjuaq’s finances are also being dragged down by legal costs related to the hamlet’s dispute with the company that constructed the building, Progère Construction Inc.

Progère, based in Trois-Rivières, launched a lawsuit against the hamlet last summer, alleging the municipality was illegally withholding $800,000 in payments for the project.

Besides the legal wranglings, Robertson said the hamlet is grappling with the bills left over from repairing a leaky roof, defective baseboards, concrete work, and a host of other deficiencies in the building that he claims the company should have done. He said the added repairs inflated the building’s final price tag to about $9.5 million, compared to the original estimated cost of $8 million.

“There were roughly 40 pages of deficiencies, some of them minor, some of them major,” he said of the company’s final work on the hamlet’s cultural centre. “The roof wasn’t properly done and as a result, we had water coming in everywhere.”

Robertson said Kuujjuaq was also hit by a number of other financial mishaps over the last couple of years, including a drop in federal funding, and a surprisingly hefty bill from repairing a bridge last year.

Two years ago, the bridge for the river running through Kuujjuaq was damaged during the spring thaw. Robertson said the hamlet faced over $200,000 more in labour expenses than he expected because the permafrost slowed down the repairs.

To reduce the deficit caused by such projects, council decided at its March 1 meeting to cut funding for an elders program that provides meals, transportation and home support, such as cleaning and non-medical nursing.

However, Robertson said elders should expect their level of care to remain the same. He argued that the council only cut funding that the hospital was supposed to be providing for services like cleaning and general helpers. He expected the hospital would make up the difference in funding.

Unlike the elders program, council did not reduce any funding to essential services like public security, sewage, water and garbage, although Robertson said he will be watching for ways to save money in other areas, such as swimming pool maintenance, development of the sewage lagoon, and future asphalting projects.

“We’re going to have to be watchful of things that can drain the money,” he said. “We just have to be dead certain that we have the funds before we can do these things.”

According to the president of the company blamed for the hamlet’s rocky financial situation, Kuujjuaq administration made the mistake of spending money it didn’t have when they decided to build the new town hall.

Marc Blais, president of Progère Construction Inc., said bad bookkeeping is the main reason Kuujjuaq fell into a money dispute with his company.

Blais said administration knew, shortly before they signed the construction contract for the town hall-cultural centre, that they lacked the funds to pay for the entire project.

As a result, he said they pressured an architect working for the Kativik Regional Government to find ways of reducing costs, by altering the building design, which he did — trimming the bottom line by $350,000.

Blais signed the contract, but said he later found that the planned savings were exaggerated by $250,000, which he said the architect admits.

Claiming he honoured his side of the contract — including the repair of the leaky roof – Blais suggests that the municipality is scapegoating his company to distract attention from their own financial mismanagement.

“The municipality didn’t have enough funding,” he said in an interview in French. “The only avenue they had to finish the project was to point to our faults… and not pay us the money that they still owe us.”

Blais said Kuujjuaq’s case suffered a blow earlier this year when a Quebec Superior Court judge rejected the hamlet’s arguments that the company’s proof, such as bills and contract paperwork, was not admissable for the civil action.

Lawyers for Kuujjuaq are appealing the judge’s decision, and expect to be back in court this summer in Amos, Quebec, near Val d’Or.