A western portion of Quebec’s busiest highway was closed for a weekend recently to repair an asphalt error. The east portion has yet to be fixed.
How long does it take to repave one long stretch of roadway? If it’s the Metropolitan Expressway, the answer is at least six years.
“The correction on the A-40 west was done this year and the east direction remains to be done before the contract is completed,” Transport Quebec spokesperson Sarah Bensadoun said.
In a second interview, she added: “The west sector needs to be completely redone, and the east sector needs to be completely redone. The only one that doesn’t need to be completely redone is the central sector, for which we have a guarantee.”
The date when the entrepreneur, Roxboro Excavation Inc., will redo its defective asphalting in the east sector of the Met between St-Laurent and Provencher Blvds. is not yet confirmed, Bensadoun said. At first, she said: “It will take place next year.” Later, she qualified the timeline: “For now, I can’t say where we will be working next year or what obstacles we will have. For now, it’s a forecast. … It could be that for all sorts of reasons it can’t be done.”
The uncertainty is mostly due to the complexity of co-ordinating the repaving with major roadwork projects, such as the ongoing renovation of the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine Bridge–Tunnel, she said. The east sector of the Met has newer asphalt, which allows it to wait, she added.
Transport Quebec awarded the nearly $29-million contract to Roxboro Excavation to resurface 11 kilometres of the Met, the province’s busiest highway, between Provencher and Cavendish Blvd. in 2019.
However, no one banked on the contractor having to do the paving two to three times.
“This job should have been done in one or two summers at the most,” Pierre Barrieau, a lecturer in transportation planning at Université de Montréal, said.
“This is a great example of the type of projects that we have to avoid because it’s just cascading into hassles for all Montrealers and it’s also slowing down future road construction jobs all around the island … because this one is not done yet.”
Roxboro Excavation referred all questions to Transport Quebec.
“Since the contract with the (transport ministry) is not completed, we are not authorized to speak to the media about the project,” Karine Banal, the company’s marketing manager, said in an email.
The mix contained 50 per cent high-quality bitumen and 50 per cent “less good-quality” bitumen that was inadequate for the Met’s high volume of traffic, Bensadoun said, adding the situation is “quite rare.”
“Obviously, this mixture means that there is a risk of premature deterioration of the rolling surface,” she said.
After Roxboro Excavation redid the west section of the Met at its own expense in 2022, the ministry’s inspectors again found that the wrong mixture of asphalt had been used, and this despite having the ministry’s recipe, Bensadoun said.
As a result, a westbound portion of the Met in the western sector was again closed recently — during the weekend of Sept. 14 and 15 — to allow Roxboro Excavation to redo its redo, and again at its own cost. A westbound portion of the Met in the west end had been closed for a weekend in May as well for the same reason.
Meanwhile, to address the deficient asphalt used on the other sections of the Met, Roxboro Excavation agreed in 2022 to provide a five-year performance guarantee on the east portion and a four-year performance guarantee on the centre portion. During the guarantee period, the contractor must repair specific problems at its own expense, such as rutting and “bleeding” of excess bitumen.
But Transport Quebec has since determined that the solution for the east section is to completely repave it at the firm’s expense, Bensadoun said. For the centre section, she added, “it is not planned to redo it completely.”
“The cost of corrective interventions is fully covered by the entrepreneur Roxboro (Excavation), including the costs of monitoring and laboratory analysis,” Bensadoun said.
The ministry considered the option of making a claim against its contractor’s performance bond, she said. That would have provided compensation to the ministry for the cost of finding another entrepreneur to redo the paving. However, the Met work could not be delayed and there was the matter of finding another contractor, Bensadoun said.
Moreover, Roxboro Excavation and its asphalt supplier, BauVal, investigated what went wrong with the asphalt, she said. “So, there was collaboration. There was good faith to be able to do the work.”
Groupe BauVal referred all questions to Transport Quebec.
Laboratory test results have shown the new asphalt that was poured in May was compliant with the ministry’s recipe, Bensadoun said. The apshalt poured in September is still under analysis.
Roxboro Excavation pleaded guilty in 2000 to collusion on Transport Quebec snow-clearing contracts with four other firms and paid a fine. Transport Quebec then sued Roxboro Excavation in a civil case related to the case. The ministry and the company reached an out-of-court settlement in 2009.
The firm was the contractor responsible for clearing Highway 13 when a March 2017 snowstorm stranded 300 people in their vehicles on the highway. A government investigator’s report blamed Transport Quebec and the Sûreté du Québec for the fiasco.
However, Bensadoun said Roxboro Excavation met all government admissibility requirements to bid on the Metropolitan Expressway paving contract. Among them, a bidder must have a certification of integrity from the provincial Autorité des marchés publics (AMP). The AMP’s integrity audit looks at a company’s record during the previous five years.
Public records in the provincial electronic bidding system, the SEAO (Système électronique d’appel d’offres), reveal Roxboro Excavation was the sole bidder on Transport Quebec’s 2019 call for tenders to resurface the Met.
Roxboro Excavation’s $29.46-million bid on the 2019 Met contract was well above the estimate range indicated in the call for tenders, which was $15 million to $19.999 million. However, Bensadoun said the range in the SEAO only serves as a guide for potential bidders to identify whether they have the capacity to handle the job and “is not representative of the estimate that the ministry makes of the project,” she said.
After negotiations, Roxboro Excavation’s price was brought down to $28.94 million.
It was determined that the price was justified, Bensadoun said, because there was a labour shortage and the Met required intervention that year. As well, the contract required the paving work to be done overnight and didn’t allow the firm to store equipment at the site, factors that would drive up the cost, she said.
“Returning to a call for tenders exposed the ministry to receiving prices that were probably similar to those we had before or even higher, or even having absolutely no bidders,” Bensadoun said.
Transport Quebec has so far paid $23.8 million to Roxboro Excavation, and it has a temporary payment holdback on $7.2 million pending the satisfactory completion of the contract, she said. There was an unforeseen added cost for the concrete slab underneath the asphalt, which “was much more damaged than anticipated,” she added.
However, the final cost of repaving the Met can only be calculated once the contract is completed, Bensadoun said. Transport Quebec will subtract $820,000 from its final payment as an indemnity that it imposed on Roxboro Excavation in 2022 when it botched the job the first time, she said.
For his part, Barrieau said he disagrees that it costs nothing to the ministry or to the public for the contractor to redo its work.
“It still has a cost in terms of the ministry,” he said. “They have to manage the contract, they have to have engineers that are validating it.”
Moreover, producing asphalt repeatedly for one project and using workers who are then not available for other jobs creates inflationary pressure on prices for other construction work, Barrieau said.
The accumulation of mistakes in this case also has an environmental impact, he said.
“It’s all the time lost and the pollution of all the automobiles and trucks that are stuck in traffic that wouldn’t be if the job had gone well the first time,” Barrieau said. “We’re at least three times, if not six times, the length that it should have been.”