Tagged: paving
Of course Industry can pave cheaper than government. But they don’t.
Province accused of sweetheart dealing — Halifax Metro
NDP accused of wasting cash — Chronicle-Herald
Chamber: Paving bill will go up — Chronicle-Herald
Road builders want government out of paving — Halifax Metro
Ideology on the road — AllNovaScotia
A sophisticated lobby by the province’s paving contractors appears to have hornswoggled the Halifax media.
Correction: the lobby isn’t all that sophisticated. Half an hour’s research would have debunked the contractors’ claim that socialist ideology trumped common sense in government’s decision to buy and run its own paving plant.
In various forums, the road-builders have argued the province can’t possibly pave roads cheaper than they can. There’s but one problem with this argument: No one disagrees.
The question isn’t how cheaply the the private sector could pave Nova Scotia highways. The question is whether government tenders for paving work are eliciting competitive bids. The evidence, available on the Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal website, shows they are not.
In the 2008 and 2009 construction seasons, 72 paving tenders drew only two bids. Ten tenders drew only one bid. A report [pdf] prepared for the province’s Chief Engineer for Highway Programs, shows paving projects in counties where bidding is competitive drew an average asphalt price of $49.02 per tonne, while tenders in non-competitive counties drew average bids of $54.91 — a 9.7 percent premium.
In some parts of the province, the problem was extreme. A tender in Yarmouth produced a low bid of $64.50. One in Digby yielded $79.20 per tonne.
The paving industry in Nova Scotia consists of a single 500-pound gorilla — Halifax-based Dexter Construction — and several local outfits scattered around the outback. The small, family-owned shops may be loathe to bid on projects in Metro, lest the gorilla retaliate by muscling in on their own home turf. Some say this happened a few years ago, and nearly put a local contractor under.
No doubt all these companies could pave cheaper than government. The question is what will it take to get them to do so. We have a crappy climate for pavement, and a lot of roads to maintain. If the province wants to get the best value for its paving dollar, having a plant in its hip pocket might be just the ticket. The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, of all groups, ought to be able to understand that.
Paving the way for Tories – another view [cont.]
The indefatigable Wallace J. McLean (note correct spelling; mea culpa) has risen to contrarian‘s challenge, and defended his view that the MacDonald government’s paving proposals were as politically skewed as the Harper government’s selective approvals thereof.
This time he buttresses his case with a map, using traditional party colors in two shades: darker for ridings in which the government proposed paving; lighter for those where it did not.
Turning this map back into numbers, the Rodney government proposed work in two out of six rural Liberal districts (33%); three out of eight rural NDP districts (38%), and 13 out of 21 rural PC districts. That’s 62% of them.
Contrarian concedes that McLean has demonstrated a provincial Tory skew from which many will impute deliberate bias. But the provincial skew does not approach the 4-to-1 edge the Harper-MacKay Reformers Conservatives bestowed upon their own ridings. In either case, the new NDP administration has a chance to banish this ancient and corrupt system by implementing its promise of a five year paving plan to get the politics out of paving..
Paving the way for Tories – another view
Some days ago, contrarian reader Wallace J. McLean challenged contrarian to determine how many of the paving projects Nova Scotia submitted for federal stimulus funding were in provincial Tory ridings. “Too much work,” we said, and went back to surfing Digg and Stumbledupon.
Well, turns out Wally is a blogger himself, and after days with a magnifying glass comparing project lists with the boundaries of Nova Scotia’s 52 provincial ridings, he offers an answer:
Of the 37 projects put forward by the late Macdonald government in NS, five were located in Liberal districts, and five in NDP districts, based on the 2006 election results…. Twenty-six were located in districts which the Tories held, or had won in 2006.
Paving the way for Tories — (cont.)
The Toronto Star weighs in on Ranger’s departure.
Paving the way for Tories — feedback
Contrarian reader Wallace J. McLean wonders:
How does the map of road work requested by Premier Fiddler compare to the provincial electoral map as it stood prior to dissolution?
It’s an obvious question, but from a look at the map, I doubt the answer would turn up anything nefarious.
Provincial paving, by its nature, takes place mainly in rural ridings. That’s where provincial roads are. Before June 9, Tories held most of the province’s rural constituencies, so most of the proposed projects were undoubtedly in Tory ridings. To show bias, one would have to demonstrate that province’s proposed infrastructure projects disproportionately favored Tory ridings like the premier’s over rural Liberal ridings like Stephen McNeil’s.
Mr. McLean is welcome to test this hypothesis by going through the list and calculating the number of projects proposed per rural Tory riding vs. the number proposed per rural opposition riding. I’ll publish the results.
But it will take a fair bit of work just to figure out the riding where each project is located, and I’ll be surprised if the results show anything like the bias apparent in the Harper government’s approvals.
