THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 1, 1996 TAG: 9608010005
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 41 lines
Imagine you're buying a house. At the last minute you're told that the price will be a trifle higher than you thought because the seller forgot to take into account two of the bedrooms, the garage and the back yard.
Your first words might be, ``Say what?'' Or possibly, ``How can that be?'' Then you'd say goodbye.
Chesapeake City Council recently got a similar nasty surprise on a planned court building.
As staff writer Mac Daniel reported last week, council was informed at a work session that the project's consultant, Hayes Seay Mattern & Mattern of Virginia Beach, forgot to include in its cost estimate about a third of the building's 172,000 square feet.
``The consultant made a mistake,'' said Thomas H. Westbrook, city assistant director of public works, ``and we didn't catch it.''
Not included in the estimate were holding cells and underground parking for judges, among other items.
Including them all in the cost estimate raises the original one by $5,363,100 - to $27 million. That's about 25 percent higher.
One word that springs to mind is ``Oops!''
Mistakes like that rattle residents' faith in government. Private business can make whopper mistakes without the public ever learning of them because private business can have secrets. Government, however, operates under constant public scrutiny. Its multimillion-dollar bloopers make news.
Westbrook said most of the $5 million will come from reimbursement from the state for the city's recent additions and renovations to the Tidewater Detention Home. That means, of course, the reimbursement money is not available for something else, at a time money is tight in Chesapeake.
The court building is needed, so City Council had to gulp and approve the extra money.
The moral of this tale seems clear enough: Double-check a consultant's work. Or as any oft-embarrassed journalist would advise, double-check all work by CNB