The emails exchanged between various bureaucrats at Public Works and Government Services and a private consultant contrast with the government's public defence of a decision to replace hundreds of work stations — described as the "BMW" of furniture — with brand new equipment for an Environment Canada building under renovations in Gatineau, Que.
One public servant, making estimates of costs for a different federal renovation project, acknowledged that projections of higher costs for recycled furniture may have been overstated.
"There is a huge guess in here, to separate workstations from free-standing . . . we did not get this split from the contractor," wrote Brian Caldwell, a project manager from Public Works and Government Services Canada for Major Crown Projects, in a May 27, 2010 email released to Postmedia News through access to information legislation.
Caldwell's message, sent to Jeffrey Wood from the CRG Consulting firm, estimated a cost of $2,793 for each recycled work station versus $2,665 for each brand new workstation, but suggested that the cost of using recycled furniture could be cheaper if officials managed all of the different aspects, including the price of storage, more effectively.
"A big cost in the reuse was off-site storage during 24 months of construction, perhaps this can be avoided . . . "
Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose declined to answer questions Monday about whether she was aware of her department's analysis of the issue.
Separate emails sent in the fall of 2010, revealed some bureaucrats were "scared" about managing a renovation project that involved recycling because of the extra work involved in managing, tracking and organizing the operation, but Caldwell, at the time, recommended doing one floor and one step at a time to be successful.
"This is the method I would recommend we advance, whether it is your project or some other, we should probably have a 'large scale' furniture reuse solution in our bag of tricks," Caldwell wrote to other officials in his department on Sept. 27, 2010.
The emails were released to Postmedia News several months after the government suggested publicly that buying brand new furniture would allow it to save about 20 per cent of the cost of workstations for Place Vincent Massey, which is under renovations. It cost about $140,000 to store hundreds of the existing workstations, described by a local office supplies company as the "BMW" of furniture, in an Ottawa warehouse for about a year, before it was to be auctioned off and replaced.
"I am torn about making a recommendation to reuse or not," Caldwell wrote on Sept. 22, 2010. "I think that there are genuinely projects where it can work."
Some of Caldwell's arguments came in response to another public servant who said he wanted to stay away from recycling projects, despite being involved in one that was supposed to reuse 75 per cent of its existing furniture.
"I have been putting my comments out that this scares the hell out of me," wrote Brian Armsden, a project management officer from the department, on Sept. 27, 2010. "I have lived through the misery of reusing furniture and 'know' it to be more expensive than purchasing new, but did not have any backup to help in proving it. Now that I have this, it may be helpful."
Liberal MP David McGuinty, who wrote to Ambrose and Environment Minister Peter Kent last summer after being told about Environment Canada's plans to dump its furniture by a business in his Ottawa riding that was storing the equipment, said the internal correspondence shows that the government does not have a comprehensive system in place to measure all the advantages or disadvantages of recycling.
"The government basically concocted a story last summer to put out a fire, because they got caught by a very responsible business person who was saying he believed the business case is here for the reuse, the refurbishing and recycling of good Cadillac-type furniture," said McGuinty in an interview.
"This is a coverup. They're fudging the numbers. They're using words to make it sound like they do have a coherent strategy to do this but they don't."
Ambrose and Kent both replied to McGuinty in August with letters that defended the government's decision to buy new furniture, noting that some of old workstations would be recycled by other federal offices.
Original Article
Source: Canada.com
No comments:
Post a Comment