This morning's Whig Standard offered readers an amusing irony. Reporter Ian Elliot writes about Queen's University's gigantic cost over-runs on the under-construction Queen's Centre. [Interestingly, this story was extensively covered in the Queen's 'Journal,' last Friday February 29th!]
Vice Principal Simpson is reported to have said that because of rising costs, etc, they are looking at "value engineering" to somehow lower costs for phases 2 and 3 of the Centre.
Kingtonians will remember when the dreaded LVEC was being rammed down our throats, that the project manager said they would use a concept called "design build." This actually is a known strategy in the construction business. In the case of the lvec, we now know that what this meant is that a number of items on the list of inclusions, got deleted: the best example of which is the 300 seat restaurent. It turned into a smaller restaurent, and a "Sports Cafe" that isn't finished yet (nor equipped since there is no one who wants to run the restaurant. So the LVEC budget will have to include all the equipment that it was thought would be provided by the restaurant operator). And, it probably meant inferior materials to those initially proposed.
Anyway, isn't the irony great? The City calls it "design build" which means 'we can change the design and use inferior materials,' and Queen's uses the phrase "value engineering" to mean the same thing!!!!
Are we sposed to miss this "spin"?? Not as niaive as they think!
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