The Wells Street revamp

Stories about Frankston Council

This is one of the public stories about Frankston City Council. There are many more that could be told privately, but telling them could be problematic, so here at least are some of the public stoies. Today let's talk about Wells Street.

The Wells Street revamp

So how could we forget the Wells St revamp? Over budget by more than half, $2.1 million or more than 60% over budget. The article says the cost overruns were due to nightworks done to minimise disruption, changes to the project scope and issues due to services being in unexpected locations. How can you call this a cost overrun?  Imagine you were building a house and the cost overrun was another 60%. What you do? Sue the builder? Stop the work and figure out how to finish it inside budget? Not finish the house because you found out too late and now don't have the money?

So here's a couple of questions:

• Why weren't nightworks planned for originally?
• What changes to the project scope were there?
• How incompetent was the planning that didn't know where services were located?
  If they weren't sure where they were, why wasn't it investigated at the start?
• What evidence is there of sufficient and adequate planning?
• Do we have any confidence that this won't happen on the next major project?

Which candidates were in office when this happened? It's not hard to figure out, but I will leave that for you.