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Taken For A Ride?
The main consultants for Mecklenburg's light rail system are big, powerful companies. They also have a notorious history of scandal, massive cost overruns, engineering snafus and deceiving the public.
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Overseeing companies this powerful, experienced and well connected isn't easy for any municipality working on a transit project. Most of the cost overruns on American transit projects come in the form of change orders that alter the original contract of the contractors working on the project. To have 10 to 20 percent of the project's final cost come from change orders is fairly standard in the transit construction industry. On a project like Charlotte-Mecklenburg's with a $2.1 billion price tag, the documentation on change orders can fill whole rooms and require a full-time staff just to process. Over-billing by contractors is another way millions of dollars can go out the door undetected. That, too, requires a full staff of auditors to keep up with. Without this kind of structured oversight, things go awry. MTA officials still can't account for what happened to all of the $900 million in cost overruns on the Red Line and Big Dig officials have forfeited millions of unaccounted-for dollars to contractors because the statute of limitations on filing claims to get the money back has run out.
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