Only a quarter of the safety and quality assurance tests required under the contract to build Transmission Gully have been signed off on, as the opening date for the highway refuses to be pinned down.
Transmission Gully about a year ago. Completion of the road has been delayed several times. Photo: RNZ / Dom Thomas
The Transport Agency wanted the 27km highway opened by Christmas but was not sure its contractor would be able to get it over the line, today releasing more information about what work was still to be done.
Transport Service general manager Brett Gliddon said as well as finishing the physical works, a large number of safety and quality assurance tests remained uncompleted.
"There are 100 safety and quality assurance tests that the contract stipulates must be met before the road can open. As of 29 October 2021, 37 final submissions have been received from the builder, of which 25 have been accepted by the Independent Reviewer as meeting the required specifications.
"Twenty-one tests are yet to be submitted and 42 have only been partially submitted."
However, he said some of the tests could not be completed until the road construction - which was "close" - had finished.
"Some might be at 90 percent but they haven't yet been signed off, so that doesn't get counted. So just taking the number as a percentage doesn't reflect the amount of work and how close they are to completing it."
"But we would absolutely love this to be a bit further along. We would love the construction to be finished and we would love less of these [consents] to do ... so the short answer is we would love it to be further advanced, but it is where it is."
There were also 47 consent tasks that contractor Wellington Gateway Partnership (WGP) and the builder, CPB HEB joint venture, needed to complete for the road to meet the contractual requirements for opening.
"Although 45 of these consent tasks are under way and have been progressed to varying degrees, only three had been fully completed as of 29 October 2021. The remaining 44 tasks will require sign off from Greater Wellington Regional Council and/or the relevant territorial authorities."
Transmission Gully's most recently promised open date of 27 September was pushed back due to Covid-19 and supply chain issues.
Gliddon said Waka Kotahi was now in the midst of commercial negotiations over how much they would have to fork out for the delays, which were out of the contractors' control.
"So because Covid, in the contract, because in essence is a force majeure event ... that's a risk of us not of theirs. That has added cost to delivery of the project for all the parties and it also means that they've had a delay in time.
"So we are agreeing what those costs are for the Covid part, not for the base construction of the road, and it's a settlement that is made with all three parties."
He said Waka Kotahi would be monitoring CPB HEB very closely.
"We'll be providing regular updates over the coming weeks so people will know how the work is tracking and understand the scale and complexity of the requirements that need to be met.
"We expect to announce in mid-December whether the road will open before Christmas or not."
Gliddon said Waka Kotahi had tried to make sure as many resources as possible were going into the road in recent times.
"We had to do some rearranging of our program to ensure that the resources were focused in on on TG."
However, he said the agency's other projects were not disrupted because of this.
The road was being built under a private-public partnership (PPP) model, with WGP having subcontracted the build to CPB HEB to undertake the motorway's design and construction, and Ventia to operate and maintain the motorway for 25 years.
After this time the responsibility would be handed to Waka Kotahi.
Transmission Gully is New Zealand's first transport infrastructure project being delivered under this model. The project has not been smooth sailing.
In February 2020 an extra $191 million was added to the government's bill due to delays and the need for extra earthworks. A few months later another $208m was added and a scathing report this year blasted the project for being flawed from the start.
It also had to contend with stretches of road needing to be relaid, after errors and court action that will continue for years to come.
Gliddon said whether more transport projects would use a PPP would be the government's call.
"It has been a challenging project, I won't deny that. But it's been challenging for a whole lot of reasons.
"The construction itself, it's an incredible feat of engineering and we've also had a whole lot of issues along the way and it is challenging to manage a Covid-type event with lockdowns because of the commercial arrangements... It's challenging on all our jobs, but it's been particularly challenging on the PPP."