Great article Joseph. You bring up some great points. I have been on the fence about the bond initiative. Part of me desperately wants to see improvement and part of me is concerned that as a city we don’t do these projects very well. This is a big ticket project and with any big ticket there can be a lot of problems.

Simply look at the Mopac express lane project. I understand this is not a city project, but they chose a bidder that couldn’t have done it for the amount they said they could and as such they have come back and asked for $100MM+ more money to complete it. They weer supposedto use the “lowest reasonable bidder” but still got pinched because humans made the decision.

Compare this with what we all saw with the “big dig” in Boston and how crazy a project it was to take on. It took 25 years to complete and while the work has payed off, the costs won’t be paid for any time soon.

The problem with the big dig? The $2.4BB cost ballooned to $14BB when all was said and done. How can we prevent this from happening here in Austin?

I believe we need to have guardrails in place to prevent crazy overruns. One idea is to have milestones tied to payment wherein we don’t pay if something isn’t finished and then we let another company finish it and pay them just the amount they completed.

Thoughts?