On June 1, the Ministry of Transportation is set to extend the winter road maintenance contract for the Sudbury district and Manitoulin to an American contractor that was issued 38 fines, totalling $392,750, between August 2013 and February 2014.
In November 2015, the Ministry of Transportation said it would end its winter road maintenance contract with DeAngelo Brothers Incorporated (DBi) early — but despite the fines for poor performance, the Ministry of Transportation insisted at the time the decision to end the contract seven years early was mutual between the province and the firm.
Transportation Ministry spokesperson Gordan Rennie told the Manitoulin Expositor at the time that, “the Ministry of Transportation and DBi Services have mutually agreed to end the contract for the Sudbury area. This is a mutual decision between the two organizations based on what is best for the province, the travelling public and for DBi Services.”
The winter highway maintenance contract with DBi started in June 2012, and was originally set to expire in 2023.
But the province later announced it would end the contract on May 31, 2016.
Between August 2013 and February 2014 DBi faced 38 fines, for a total of $392,750.
Those included a $72,000 fine for not deploying its equipment within the first 30 minutes of a winter storm, and $8,000 for not deploying crews after two centimetres of snow or slush was present on the highways.
“There were some serious issues with DBi,” Nickel Belt MPP France Gélinas told Sudbury.com today.
But the province has now said it will extend DBi's winter highway maintenance contract for the Sudbury area from June 1, 2016 to the fall of 2017 — and that fact has Gélinas fuming.
“It doesn't matter that they've put people's lives at risk,” Gélinas said. “It doesn't matter that people have died on our roads.”
Progressive Conservative transportation critic Michael Harris, however, questions whether the fines against DBi were even legitimate.
“The government has only collected a small portion of those fines,” he said. “Were those fines levied legitimately, or were they simply a public relations tool the government used to shift the blame onto the contractor and away from themselves?”
After it cut DBi's original contract, the Ministry of Transportation said it issued a request for proposals for maintenance services in the Sudbury area, which included 1,325 two-lane kilometers of provincial highway between Elliot Lake and Hagar and north of Cartier to Point-Au-Baril and Manitoulin Island.
But none of the proposals provided good value for taxpayer dollars, the ministry said.
Strangely, because DBi had the lowest bid, it got to extend a contract it was scheduled to lose prematurely.
Harris said he asked the Ministry of Transportation for the terms of the contract extension with DBi, but has not yet gotten a response.
“I asked how much more are they paying on top of the fixed price, and they wouldn't answer me,” he said.
Sudbury.com contacted the Ministry of Transportation for comment, but did not receive a response by deadline.
In April 2015, Ontario's auditor general released a damning report on the Liberals' privatization of winter highway maintenance.
In her 43-page report, Bonnie Lysyk said Ontario’s motorists have faced less safe winter highway conditions since 2009, when the Liberals changed the way they contracted out winter road maintenance in an attempt to save money.
Contracts were awarded primarily to the lowest bidders, Lysyk wrote, but in many cases, they did not have sufficient equipment to do the work.
“Over the past five years, winter highway maintenance service levels have declined from the level that Ontarians have historically been used to,” Lysyk said in the report, entitled "Winter Highway Maintenance."
The Legislative Assembly’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts requested the audit.
“The Ministry of Transportation has been successful in reducing and containing escalating winter maintenance costs, but the time it takes to clear highways during and after a storm, to make them as safe as possible for motorists in winter, has increased,” Lysyk said after tabling her report.
In 2009-2010, the most travelled highways in the province were cleared to achieve bare pavement, on average, in 2.1 hours after the end of a storm; this increased to an average of 4.7 hours after the end of a storm in the winter of 2013-2014, the auditor found.
And six of the 20 contract areas did not even meet the province’s standard of clearing the most travelled highways within eight hours 90 per cent of the time, “a generous standard when compared to other jurisdictions,” the report said.
While Greater Sudbury fared better than other cities in the north – 97 per cent of area highways were cleared within the target time – results were far worse in communities such as Kenora (69 per cent), Thunder Bay West (79 per cent) and Thunder Bay East (87 per cent).
After the auditor general's report was tabled, Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca said the system of winter highway maintenance needs to be better.
“That is why last week's budget includes funding for more equipment changes — dedicated spreaders for both urban congested areas and select locations in northern Ontario and funding to improve driving conditions with the increased use of de-icing liquids,” he said in a statement. “We are also taking swift action on the Auditor's recommendations, with several to be in place by the start of next winter.”
Gélinas said privatization is to blame for the province's poor record on winter road maintenance, but Harris, the PC transportation critic, said the private system worked fine for the first nine years.
It was in 2009, he said, when the province switched to a performance-based system, that contractors started to cut corners to meet their contract obligations.
Sudbury.com contacted DeAngelo Brothers Incorporated to comment on this story, but did not receive a response by deadline.
