NDP wants review of P3 school plans
— then put all of that information into the hands of somebody who has the technical expertise, who’s entrusted by the legislature in an independent way to do that analysis and then report out.”
SaskBuilds Minister Don McMorris faced questions Monday about the costs of the project based on the estimate Premier Brad Wall gave when announcing the P3 plans last week.
Wall said the traditional cost of the project — 18 new schools in nine joint-use buildings that each accommodate one public school and one separate school — would be $450 million, or $50 million per facility.
The P3 process is expected to bring that down to $420 million, or about $47 million per building, Wall said.
Asked how that compares to the contract to build the Willowgrove joint-use facility REGINA — The NDP Opposition wants an independent technical review of the government’s plans to build 18 new schools through a public-private partnership bundling, education critic Trent Wotherspoon says.
“Government’s taking sort of a ‘just trust us’ approach,” Wotherspoon told reporters Monday after question period at the Legislative Building in Regina.
“What Saskatchewan people deserve is … the real numbers, and they also need to articulate the entire full life-cycle cost to Saskatchewan people. And it’s not good enough for governments to simply boast or suggest numbers … What you really need is some sort of independent analysis on that front, something that’s lacking right now.”
Wotherspoon said the Opposition is “working on a mechanism” that it will “be speaking to in the coming days.”
He suggested there could be an independent body — appointed by perhaps a legislative committee and maybe on a contract — that has the technical capacity to analyze and make sure accountability is there before money is spent on a project such as the bundling of nine facilities into a P3.
“We always hear government saying, ‘We can’t share that because it’s commercially sensitive,’ ” Wotherspoon said. “OK, fair enough in Saskatoon for under $31 million, McMorris said that figure doesn’t include other costs such as furniture and professional services.
The estimated total Willowgrove cost is actually closer to $40 million, a government spokesperson said later.
That is still lower than the estimated $50 million per facility, but McMorris said the number for the two-in-one schools was based on an average of $25 million for each of the last seven schools constructed in Saskatchewan, and compares to $53 million for a joint-use facility in Swift Current.
“We have an idea certainly from (the Ministry of) Education as to what the last seven have been, and in particular the Swift Current one,” McMorris said.
“We believe that there is going to be savings. We believe that the schools will be built sooner … It’s tough for us to pinpoint those savings exactly … We took an average of what it costs to build a school of that size and kind of figured out from Alberta what that savings could look like,” he said.
McMorris said he isn’t worried that Alberta attracted only one bidder on a recent bundle of schools, or about an upcoming auditor report on earlier bundles in that province. If only one bidder comes in at a high price in Saskatchewan, the government has “the option of not taking that,” he said.
“We’re going to move forward. There are off-ramps. If this isn’t going to save the taxpayers money in the long run, we’re not going to move forward with it. We want to make sure that it continues to make sense.”