Do I ever get tired of being right, you ask? Not really.
As I wrote about six months ago when this $2.2 million dollar monstrosity was approved:
Prediction: this will pass at $2.2 million on Monday night…but halfway through the construction, a LOT of new charges will come in as the contractor “surprisingly” finds issues nobody knew was there. These are called “change orders” and it’s the oldest trick in the book to grab more money from a government that is now trapped.
The City wasn’t kind enough to put the actual AMOUNT of all these “unforeseen” issues into the packet [page 23]…but they DID say “the City remains within the contingency,” so it must have been a pretty good chunk. I’d guess $30k or $40k. I believe the contingency amount was set around $100,000. Not exactly peanuts.