Watchdog: Oops! Belmar’s math is off, boardwalk rebuild to cost more
Miscalculation forces borough to pay 21 percent more
From the story:
When Birdsall prepared the specifications for contractors to bid on the boardwalk reconstruction project, they based it on the walkway being 25 feet wide, said Colleen Connolly, the borough’s administrator. But portions of the boardwalk are wider than that.
That underestimation alone added $1,017,555 to the project’s cost, according to borough documents.
and
Mayor Matt Doherty defended the additional expenses, saying he disagrees that Birdsall “grossly underestimated” how much building material Belmar needed for reconstructing the boardwalk.
“Contractors are used to it; towns are used to it,” said Doherty of change orders. “It’s part of the cost of building large projects. There’s going to be added costs.”
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Unfortunately for our mayor, I and some people of similar mind refuse to get “used to it”. But since Birdsall seems to have forgotten what our boardwalk looked like, and apparently nobody wrote it down, I took it on myself to dig up an old photo of the oceanfront pre-Sandy that maybe they can use as a guideline:
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