Filtration plant cost overruns ‘can’t be accounted for’

By N. Clark Judd

A city Independent Budget Office analysis has found that skyrocketing construction costs for the Croton filtration plant cannot be completely accounted for by the reasons given by the city agency undertaking the project.

Findings from the IBO, released on Oct. 16 at a Croton Facilities Monitoring Committee meeting, indicate that about $661 million of a $1.2 billion increase in construction costs and just under half of the rise in the total price tag of the controversial project can’t be explained by inflation and a nationwide uptick in the cost of largescale projects

The Croton plant and associated work is now expected to cost water rate payers $3.08 billion by the IBO’s reckoning. In 2003, when the project’s environmental impact statement, or EIS, was first drafted, city Department of Environmental Protection officials estimated it would cost $1.3 billion.

Neither the IBO nor the DEP, which is building the massive plant under Van Cortlandt Park to treat water coming to the city from the Croton watershed upstate, has provided a concrete explanation for the increases in cost that can’t be attributed to inflation.

“What we did find … [is that] construction costs, that’s of the basic plant construction, have more than doubled since the EIS in 2003,” said George Sweeting, a deputy director at the IBO, at the Oct. 16 committee meeting. “We tried to look at how much of it is due to general construction cost escalation, sometimes known as inflation, and our sense is that explains about 45 percent of that increase.”

DEP First Deputy Commissioner Steven Lawitts has repeatedly said that rising material costs, a weakening dollar and a rise in the cost of labor were the primary reasons the project has so monumentally increased in price.

Longtime watchdogs of the project say the IBO findings reinforce their belief that the city had deliberately understated the project’s cost.