Who is responsible for the WCC Town Hall blowout?

A very interesting analysis at Scoop by Lindsay Shelton:

Some of the blame can be put fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the Client, namely the Council, the University, and the NZSO, as well as the Hobbit King himself, as together the lot of them agreed to ask the Contractor for a change in the Contract to provide a top of the line recording studio to be built into a new basement facility below the Auditorium. To those of you familiar with the ins and outs of the ways of the Contractor, you will probably realise that asking a Contractor to add a new Basement level below the level of the base isolators and thereby adding in basement level complexity on an already highly complex basement job, is going to cost a lot … I am not at all surprised there is significant extra cost there, although of course I didn’t expect the costs to double.

So the Council has gone for a gold plated option, and left ratepayers footing a $4,000 per household bill.

It seems the large number of design changes resulted in a very large number of variations from the contractor. “Naylor Love have noted that approximately 30-40 per cent of each progress claim is related to variation activities.”

So the client (WCC) keeps changing their mind on what they want – no surprise it has gone from $43 million to over $300 million.