OPW and projected cost of 442K for Modular Homes

Temporary Modular homes for Ukrainians former and latter missing from the thread title there.

The govt pick the contractors and the contractors pile it on because they are told they can.

Agreed. Hanlon's razor may well apply here, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." But by ipso facto one or the other must apply with lunacy like this.

jayzus…at the rate theyre going the IMF be back soon and some gobdaw of a politician will be telling us sure we all partied…did we fcuk!!!

That's not the modular homes that we need though, that's small scale shipping long distances while we need massive scale shipping a few km. It's not in any way sustainable to the shipping houses long distances

Nowhere has made large scale modular home building work out cheaper than traditional building methods.

O'Donovan was the minister when all this was going on. It only changed recently.

Promotion based on incompetence?

It sounds like we started negotiating with a single supplier and once we were committed, the price just shot up. Of course we could import them by ship. Lots of bulky, but high valued goods are imported by sea. The whole idea behind using pre-fabricated homes was that because they are made in a factory, that factory can be anywhere in the world. I remember a hotel was built near Dublin Airport using modular units (each bedroom arrived fully constructed and kitted out) and was assembled on site in around half the time it would take to build a conventional hotel. As far as I remember the units were manufactured in the Netherlands.

True but he was until April by which all these contacts would have been completed and he is a cabinet minister now.

We will look back in year to come at how we utterly wasted this corporation tax windfall from a handful of large MNCs.

Absolute disgrace, but nobody will be held accountable as usual. The OPW bypassed normal procurement procedures as Mr ROG's department had a timeframe for delivery 😂😂. Why can the Department of Integration ignore the rules, cost hundreds of millions in tax money, and RO'G keeps hiding any time there's a problem. Wasn't around to answer any questions when people were protesting or before the referendum. He'll be missing this time too. As for the OPW - someone in that department thinks they're playing monopoly and needs to be fired.

https://www.thejournal.ie/cost-of-modular-homes-for-ukrainian-refugees-more-than-double-as-some-deadlines-missed-by-years-6500701-Sep2024/

The modular home BER rating was expected to be A2… but what a surprise they were found to be only C1 leading to further costs to upgrade this. I'm sure every project the OPW are involved in goes this was..

What it's largely down to is public procurement rules being set up to more or less guarantee cost overruns in public projects.

The problem is this. In an attempt to prevent cronyism, favouritism, etc, public procurement law, both in Ireland and elsewhere, typically requires the state to accept the lowest tender, or offer clear, objectively demonstrable reasons for preferring a higher tender.

This means that, to get the contract, you have to bid the lowest tender price. It is not worth your while participating in the tender process unless you are aiming to do that.

How do you get your price down as low as possible? With conditions and contingencies.

In principle it's acceptable to make your tender subject to conditions about future events that you can't control or manage. Let's say you're bidding now to, say, install and erectmodular houses over the course of 2025. You're going to have to pay whatever the going rate for labour is over the course of 2025. You're going to have to pay the market price for all your inputs, most of which are imported. Etc, etc. So, to price your bid, you have to make assumptions about what pay rates in the construction trade will be next year, what the exchange rate of the euro against the dollar and the yuan will be over the course of 2025, and so forth. Plus there may be aspects of the design of the project that are not yet finalised; you have to make assumptions about how they will be finalised. Etc, etc. And your tender specifies that, for each assumption which is not borne out in practice, the contract price will be adjusted.

So, you make (and state) a series of aggressively optimistic assumptions about pay inflation, price inflation, exchange rate movements, supply chain issues, relevant weather conditions, design decisions, etc, etc. Individually, each assumption is defendable, if optimistic. But, collectively, they are fairly improbable; it's possible that every single one of your very optimistic assumptions will prove to be exactly right, but it's freakishly unlikely. Therefore signficant contract price adjustments are, in practice, inevitable.

Of course the customer reviews the assumptions and can see that they are, in aggregate, wildly optimistic. But so what? This is not an objectively defensible basis for preferring one of the other tenders, since all the tenders are price on the basis of a similar wild optimism.

This, basically, is why public procurement projects always, always, always, experience signficant cost overruns. Of course other factors can come into play that mean even more cost overruns; I am not suggesting that this is a complete explanation of every cost overrun. But it does provide a solid foundation of virtually guaranteed cost overruns on on public procument projects.

Something has to be done here the current system of politicians short term goals to be re-elected which means their eye is firmly off the ball with regards to the day to day running of the country and the fact that for decades now our perm-government, semi-states, government depts and our civil/public servants have been reckless with regards to spending our cash and can no longer be trusted to spend our tax take. There needs to be some kind of publicly viewable road map with the main point/focus being full transparency and a full view of the costs and contracts at a timely fashion for people to comment/advise/criticize what our money is being spent on. The road map needs to happen before the likes of the OPW are allowed spend like drunks in a strip club again. There is as much if not more expertise out there in the general public with regards to budgets, tendering and spending then there is in these closed off institutions where there is zero accountability.

The other side of this is tomorrow we have a budget and its all smoke and mirrors will FF/FG/Greenie try to buy your vote remember its your money they are buying it with in the first place. These knobs will throw a big can of kerosene on an already on fire economy with the likes of the apple tax, AIB share sales meaning we have a huge suplus but the fact is taking these ones off monies coming in and our corpo tax out of the equation currently we have a deficit of over 4billion. It will be interesting how much larger this deficit will be after tomorrow as the current govenment are not listening to advice on paying current expenditure from one offs or a burgeoning tax take from one sector as in corpo tax. I mean this played out back in 2007/8 when we based our current expenditure on the stamp duty receipts thinking this would be forever more so its not like they have not seen it before. If Trump gets in and gives the top 10 companies who pay the majority of corpo tax in this country any kind of a deal the country could be in schitz creek again.

Gombeen Men to the OPW.