Seattle Tunnel Partners welcomes taxpayers to the realm of insanity

Workers with Seattle Tunnel Partners are preparing to lift Bertha out in pieces. Bertha reached its stopping point in the repair pit March 3.

Taken from Wednesday’s edition of KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show.

There’s something remarkable in The Seattle Times story. Seattle Tunnel Partners were asked, how much will the tunnel project delay cost in overruns?

Related: Workers prepare to lift part of tunnel machine out of pit

What Seattle Tunnel Partners told The Seattle Times is they have no idea what the overruns are or what the overruns will amount to. They have no estimate, they said, how much more this will end up costing all of us.

Either they are lying to us, or we have the most grossly incompetent people running this project in the history of engineering.

I’m not saying their estimate could change with time. What I’m saying is that they’re claiming at this point, there is no idea in how much there will be overruns.

When asked how much repairs will cost, project manager Chris Dixon said he has no idea. He does not have a figure.

First there was an estimate of $125 million. That increased to $210 million in change-order requests.

You’re telling me, that Seattle Tunnel Partners haven’t done any up-to-date estimates of how much this is going to end up costing us?

If it’s going to be a couple billion in overruns, Seattle Tunnel Partners will declare bankruptcy and just stick it to the taxpayers.

If it’s $1 billion, we can’t absorb that. It’s going to come to the taxpayers.

But if they are truly doing this without any estimate of how much this is going to cost?

Would you do that if you had a major repair on your home and somebody came and said, you know what, we’re just going to start fixing, and when we’re done, we’ll give you the bill.

That would be insanity.

We are now in the realm of the insane with the tunnel project.

Taken from Wednesday’s edition of KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show.

KR