Revelations by Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk about problems with poor quality asphalt leading to cracks in the province's highways have a particular resonance in Sudbury, where another auditor general made similar finding a few years ago.
In her annual report released Wednesday, Lysyk said the pavement on major provincial roads has failed prematurely because contractors hired by the province sometimes used substandard asphalt.
“Premature cracks in pavement have significantly increased the ministry’s highway-repair costs,” Lysyk said after her report was tabled in the legislature. “The Ministry of Transportation needs to be more proactive to ensure the right material is used so that work is done properly the first time.”
The Ontario Hot Mix Producers Association – representing asphalt producers and cement suppliers — requested the MTO delay implementing tests that would help identify asphalt likely to crack prematurely, and the ministry agreed, the report said.
“In the past five years, the ministry completed almost 2,100 projects at a cost of about $6.1 billion, with about $1.4 billion of that going to asphalt to pave highways,” Lysyk wrote. “For a sample of five highway jobs where documentation was available, we calculated that the ministry paid $23 million for repairs, after only one to three years, on top of the $143 million to initially pave these highways that should have lasted 15 years.”
“The ministry also pays contractors bonuses (approximately $8 million annually) for providing the quality of asphalt as required in the contract, something contractors are always expected to do anyway. It also continued paying bonuses even though it became aware that contractors were tampering with asphalt samples to obtain the bonuses.”
The findings are similar to a 2012 audit by then Sudbury Auditor General Brian Bigger, whose audit of the municipal roads department found that there was a lack of testing of the asphalt used in city road construction.
“The city has not been ensuring that the hot mix asphalt producers meet JMF quality standards within tolerances specified in OPSS 310 for aggregate gradation and AC content,” Bigger wrote in his report.
OPSS is short for Ontario Provincial Standard Specifications.
For each roads project, Bigger said a specified formula for asphalt is specified in the contract, to ensure the new pavement will be strong enough to last as long as the city expects.
“But the city has never tested the asphalt against that recipe,” he wrote in his report, something he identified as a “major deficiency” in municipal practices.
“What we found is quite alarming.”
As part of the review, the AG's office tested pavement samples from several city roads projects. What they found was a high percentage of the asphalt was below the strength specified by the city. For example, work on Lasalle Boulevard was found to include significant sections with below-standard pavement. On Radar Road in Hanmer, half of some samples were below standard, while a smaller sample of work done on Main Street in Chelmsford found all of the samples weren’t up to snuff.
The audit went on to win an award in 2013 from a North American association of auditors, a group that includes more than 300 audit departments in cities in Canada and the United States.
As for Lysyk's audit, she also found other problems with the way the government handles road repair and maintenance:
Ministry officials allowed the Ontario Road Builders’ Association to influence its internal operational policies to benefit contractors rather than the ministry.
The ministry is lenient with contractors who perform poorly, allowing those that have received unsatisfactory ratings to continue to bid for and win significant amounts of work. The ministry has also paid to repair substandard work even when it was covered by the contractor’s warranty.
Contractors hire the engineers who certify the quality of construction projects, not the province. Some engineers have provided certifications for structures across the province later found to have problems.
The ministry continues to award projects to contractors that breach safety regulations. Its penalties for these contractors are supposed to prevent them from bidding on future work, but in fact do not.
