February 29, 2008

The rocky terraine on both Hwys 69 and 11 expansion projects created some of the conditions that led to the creation of the new position.

Contract Management

Corridor Manager will be ‘go to’ for projects

Hwys. 69, 11 require special central manager

PETER KENTER

correspondent

NORTHERN ONTARIO

Acting on a suggestion by the Ontario Road Builders Association (ORBA), the Ontario Ministry of Transportation (MTO) has agreed to create a new supervisory position — Corridor Manager — for long-term Highways 69 and 11 projects in northeastern Ontario.

ORBA suggested that the position be created so that a single authority could help to resolve contract disputes and maintain consistent standards of the four-lane project work being completed on both highways.

“We’re very pleased that the Ministry has agreed to the proposal,” says Rob Bradford, ORBA executive director. “We floated the idea last year to the Minister of Northern Development at that time, Rick Bartolucci, and then brought it up with the Minister of Transportation in the last week of January.”

The position will become a one-window communication link for all four-laning work on Highways 11 and 69 and will report to the Manager of Contracts.

“As the four-laning program grew in size and complexity, consideration was given to reorganize the region’s Contracts Office to streamline the administration of numerous projects at the same time,” says Gordan Rennie, regional issues advisor with MTO.

“At that time, it was decided to assign the role to one regional contracts engineer. Only recently have we considered alternatives, initially due to work load reasons. Other issues, such as consistency, uniformity, timeliness of responses and other support issues arose over the past six months.”

Bradford says the position will help to clarify contentious contract issues and specifications so that contractors on both projects will be able to operate on a level playing field.

“One example is all of the heavy rock work in the area,” says Bradford. “Let’s say one contractor gets a contract document saying they have to excavate a certain amount of rock, then use a million tonnes of it as fill in another part of the project. What happens if there are only half a million tonnes to excavate and you now don’t have enough fill to satisfy the contract? Is the contractor now responsible for outsourcing the additional aggregate? We might get answers from different representatives ranging from the ministry assuming responsibility to ‘you figure it out.’ Consistency in specifications is what we’re after.”

Under the new plan, contentious issues will only need to be addressed once, common technical issues will only need to be researched once, and lessons learned on various construction projects can be communicated directly to MTO’s design teams.

The Corridor Manager position is currently envisaged by MTO as a one-time-only position assigned specifically to deal with the current projects in its Northeastern Region. The hiring process for the position has begun and the position is expected to be filled in about three months.

“We’d like to see the position as a new responsibility and not additional responsibility for an existing position,” adds Bradford. “If we have someone devoted to determining exactly how the contract will be interpreted we can eliminate a lot of problems and save money on these projects.”

Print | Email | Comment