According to a study by the City of Winnipeg, a new Water Treatment Plant, from pre-construction approval to operation, should take 6 years and cost $204 million. “This includes design, construction and environmental approval costs, and provides for inflation.” Only 2-3 of these years are needed for actual construction.

In New York, as usual, government planners have under-budgeted and under-estimated project times. Although the plant should cost $200 million, New York City budgeted $992 million and 8 years. That’s 5 times the budget and 150% the allotted time. Maybe they were following the rule of thumb that project always take twice as long and cost twice as much as planned.

In usual government fashion, the treatment plan “will cost more than twice the original estimate of $992 million and it will not be finished on time“. With a budget expansion of over $1 billion and an additional 4 years tacked on, the new plant is expected to open on October 31, 2011 at a cost of over $2 billion. October 2011? Don’t hold your breath. And unlike the World Trade Center, this is without the MTA and Port Authority holding it up.

After acknowledging the importance of the situation, over 10 years have gone by, and there is still no treatment plant. It’s a good thing the government can milk the taxpayers and doesn’t have to beg bondholders for more money, otherwise this plan would have been grounded years ago.

If it can’t produce clean drinking water in a dozen years for 10 times the average cost, why should we trust the government to manage something as complicated as a health care system? We also shouldn’t trust their cost estimates. Not without magnifying them 10-fold.