A government axing of big roading projects is sending workers offshore and has put the Waikato Expressway finish a year behind schedule, a Hamilton MP says.
The final segment of the $2.1 billion expressway is now not expected to be finished until middle or late 2021.
The New Zealand Transport Agency has put the delay down to “resourcing levels for the contractor in a constrained construction market and unseasonal weather of the 2016/17 summer.”
The incoming Labour-led government called a halt to National’s plans to carry expressway work south of Cambridge and Hamilton East National MP David Bennett contended the delay was due to workers heading to Australia for better job prospects as work here dries up.
“The workforce here know they don’t have any roading projects to go on with. It’s very difficult to get people to do this kind of work in this type of infrastructure now because the Government has cancelled future projects on the Waikato Expressway. And that doesn’t give certainty for staff and so they are making their own decisions and they are deciding to move before that work finishes.
“They’ve got a very strong signal in front of them from the Government that post-2020 there is no work for them in this field, the Government has shifted their transport funding and infrastructure funding to Auckland rail and it hasn’t given the ability for people to build roads.”
Bennett also doesn’t believe the wet weather of 2016/17 summer is a valid reason for the delay.
“We’ve had a drought this summer in the Waikato. There is no real excuse weather-wise, they could have picked up the work and finished that. The Huntly bypass has been confirmed that it will be finished in 2020 and there were no weather issues there and that’s in the same region.”
The Hamilton section is the seventh and final part of the 102km expressway which runs from the Bombay Hills to just south of Cambridge.
The 21-kilometre-long section includes 17 new bridges, walking, and cycling links.
The $632 million project began in 2016. It has been designed and built by a group comprising Fletcher, Beca, Higgins, and Coffey, in alliance with the NZ Transport Agency.
A review is currently underway around the delay and when completed in June it will give NZTA a better idea of expected completion dates.
Transport Minister Phil Twyford declined to comment, calling the issue an operational matter.
Darryl Coalter, NZTA Delivery portfolio manager, said a staffing issues weren’t because of people heading overseas for better job security.
“You can take it from the context of the 2011 earthquakes – our resources have been used up by significant rebuild projects. If you add in Auckland’s CRL [City Rail Link] they are pretty enormous projects for New Zealand’s size so all of those things add tension to keeping people in the market.
“2020 is still a fair way away, you just don’t know what could happen in the interim, what projects could come out. I think there is still plenty of work around if you look in the GPS’s [Government Policy Statement on land transport ] and national transport portfolio. There is still plenty of work and plenty of investment in the assets, Coalter said.
NIWA and Waikato Regional Council figures show while the end of 2016 was quite dry, the big impact came from a string of ex-tropical cyclones in 2017, Coalter said.
“There were enormous rainfalls and effectively what happened then was the groundwater on the site rose between one and three metres. Unuseable material because of silt also meant more soil had top be moved, adding time.
“It’s a reality sometimes when you can’t account for all ground conditions, you can’t take account of the weather sometimes. I would love every project to come in early but sometimes you are in the lap of the gods,” Coalter said.
NZTA had realised in within the last month that they would be no longer able to deliver the project in the predicted timeframe. The Hamilton section remains on budget.
The Longswamp section is on schedule to be completed in 2019 and Huntly next year.
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