Perth Voice Interactive

THE bungled geothermal project at Vincent’s Beatty Park looks likely to cost ratepayers nearly $600,000.

A detailed report, commissioned in 2015 by new CEO Len Kosova, says the system, installed in 2012, was meant to warm the pools and complex powerfully and cheaply by tapping into the raw molten power of the earth.

Instead, poor project management by the council led to constant breakdowns, and system inadequacies means it only partway heats the pools and doesn’t warm any air except in the boiler room.

The council’s had to keep the old back-up gas heater going, resulting in bills as high as $265,000, more than three times the budget. Because of a balls up in design the gas boiler can’t just “top off” the tepid geothermal heater: only one or the other can be on at the same time, so the gas-powered boiler ran all winter.

Back when the system was installed proper calculations weren’t done as to how big the heat exchanges and valves should be. Instead, a tradie eyeballed it and significantly underestimated what was required.

According to a council report the “system had started to experience inexplicable breakdowns, which led to significant down-times”. It crashed four or five times a year.

Last year the council lost $100,000 in federal grants for another new system that would’ve let it build an air heating system on top of the geothermal plant because it couldn’t fix the breakdown bugs in time. The council will now spend nearly $200,000 on replacement and backup boilers.

At the time directors still had no clue who was responsible, beyond saying “various contractors” had worked on the project and they’d “failed to identify culpability”.

An independent review commissioned by the council has now found proper “thermal load measurements” (ie, how much heat was needed) were never carried out nor verified by the engineer who built the thing.

“Thermal calculations were based on information provided to the city by a pool blanket supplier,” the report findings state, and those guestimations were based on the pools before their change in a major upgrade.

Other problems stemmed from having seven different engineering disciplines involved in the project, but no lead contractor to coordinate them, leaving city staff trying to do the job, without any technical know-how.

To top it all off, the manufacturers were never brought in to review all the calculations and assumptions before the system was built (a service they’ll happily provide), meaning they can’t now be held responsible for the systems’ shortcomings.

Mayor John Carey is furious about the layer cake of mistakes.

“This, in my mind, is another embarrassing episode for the city which our new CEO is now resolving,” he says.

He says it’s “extraordinary” that calculations were left to a pool blanket supplier and holds the council’s former management team responsible for failing to engage a lead contractor.

“When we’re managing major projects we need to have clear lines of accountability and responsibility.”

He says CEO Len Kosova has “been here coming up to two years, and we are still uncovering and unpicking errors of the past”.

“The Beatty Park issue is just one symptom of a range of challenges we’ve faced, which has been the budget deficit [when a mistake saw the council heading to an $8 million deficit], a complete lack of a management contract with Leederville Gardens, and a lack of a contract regarding Bendigo Bank and the sponsorship of TVs at Beatty Park”.

The latter referred to a botched deal with the former administration, in a “bizarre and inappropriate” handshake deal with the local Bendigo Bank branch.

Bendigo was supposed to pay the council $22,000 to put up TVs in Beatty Park, with the bank’s logo intermittently appearing on them, and in return the council would switch some of its banking business over to Bendigo. Turned out it was massively impractical to move part of the council’s accounts to Bendigo so the bank never paid up, but the tellies had already been bought, leaving the council out of pocket.

Mr Carey says the litany of problems vindicates the transparency agenda he’s been trying to spread to other local governments, saying he’s not afraid to air Vincent’s dirty laundry.

by DAVID BELL