New County nursing home build facing contractor issues and delays

By Sharon Harrison
The County’s $100 million new long-term care facility currently under construction to replace H.J. McFarland Memorial nursing home is facing contractor issues, as well as a six-month delay for completion – but the good news is it’s nearly half way complete and on budget.

Last week’s committee of the whole meeting, (the last such meeting for this term of council), heard from Mohamed Jaber, project manager with Colliers Project Leaders. Due to technical issues, there was no live-stream for this meeting, and the provided recording was of poor quality for this item.

However, a detailed presentation with a project status update was provided, revealing challenges with “serious contractor errors, communication issues, and a lack of detail being provided by the contractor”, putting the expected completion date (May 2027) and the opening date (July 2027), in jeopardy.

Overall construction progress is said to be 48 per cent complete.

Jaber provided some detail on an issue involving an error made with the concrete, along with issues where the contractor was deviating from the contract.

“We’ve had an issue on-site where transfer slab had to be demolished and re-constructed, so that’s one of the big issues we have experienced so far, and it will have a significant impact on the schedule, and we are talking about six months,” Jaber outlined.

“Essentially, what happened was, concrete trucks were siting on site for a number of hours, and they kept adding water to the concrete,” he said, noting how the inspections flagged that there were issues with the concrete and with the compressed strength of the concrete.

The contractor is progressing in other areas of the project, but Jaber noted the transfer slab connects the whole building together and that’s where the significant issue is right now. He said if the transfer slab is not complete, the building cannot get connected together.

Transfer slab demolition is expected to be completed in the next two weeks, with re-pouring of the transfer slab anticipated early November.

Councillor David Harrison was concerned with the contractor issues noting similarities with the problems experienced with the Wellington water trunk line project.

“I’m not really impressed by what appears to be a lot of problems, whether contractor oversight or what it is, but to me that doesn’t look like a smooth project,” expressed Harrison.

“Dealing with the contractor was not pleasant,” shared Jared, “we’ve had issues with the contractor having delayed things and asking for additional funds, and we’ve managed to overcome these issues, however, we are still having issues with the contractor to date.”

Harrison suggested the new council should be provided with an interim update in a couple of months “because it looks to me like another Wellington almost, and I hate to say that”.

Jaber said they can’t disagree.

“We’ve had serious challenges. We’ve pushed back, we’ve thrown the contract back at them (multiple times) when we thought we had some challenges,” he said. “We have lawyers on board, and we will access them as needed, bring them in as needed. We want to make sure that we are fully prepared to push back. We are pushing back; we are prepared.”

Matheson Constructors of Aurora, Ontario was the successful bidder for this tender coming in at $67.1 million, the lowest of four bids received (awarded Jan. 2025). The three other bids received ranged from $75.2 million to $79.7 million, and while all were Ontario-based firms, none were from local companies.

Councillor Kate MacNaughton asked how much of the problems is typical and would be expected to be experienced with a build of this scale, where she said it sounds like it’s outside of a norm.

“Definitely, a miss like that should never happen on a construction site, especially by experienced professionals who do that, do this or any construction work every day,” responded Jaber.

“It looks like a lot of the budget is gone… the cement that was no good, we are not being charged for that right?” asked councillor Brad Nieman. “Let’s make that very clear, it is something we are not paying.”

Jaber said that is correct, confirming that all the demolition work, re-construction work in terms of design is covered by the contractor. “That’s their issue and they need to re-do it at their own cost.”

However, Jaber confirmed they are on budget.

Of the total $94.7 million project budget, to date $74.4 million has been used or committed. Of the $11.5 million contingency, seven per cent has been used.

“We are in pretty good shape budget-wise, even if we had to pay that full amount [change orders], we’ve got a lot of contingency. Considering getting out of the ground is the hardest parts often of any project, we are out of the ground… unfortunately we got out of the ground then we had to go back into it to get the slab out, but that’s often the challenges.”

There is $787,000 in approved change orders, covering 69 change orders and two change directives. Pending change orders total $2.6 million. “$1,872,069 worth of quotes provided by the contractor will not be accepted in their current form and are under discussion,” notes Jaber.

“Considering how far along we are, we are actually pretty happy with the progress given the number of changes we’ve had on the project, to date.”

Design brief look at the long term care building

The new McFarland Memorial Long-Term Care Home is to include 160 beds, up from the 84 beds currently, almost doubling capacity.

Also chiming in was councillor Chris Braney who indicated how it seems to be becoming a common trend to experience these types of challenges with contractors, where he asked if the municipality has any kind of plan to alleviate that.

Braney also spoke to the impacts of using non-local construction firms, suggesting that the next term of council look at the County’s procurement process.

“Does it help if there are local contractors involved in these things moving forward, because they have to walk down the sidewalk and face people, they can’t just run away from it?” asked Braney. “It seems that when we have work done by people who are invested in the County, and live in the County, that it seems to go much smoother, so I am sort of seeing this trend.

“I think it’s something we should be concerned about because it seems to be every time we have a major infrastructure scenario and we have contractors involved, we just seem to be behind the eight-ball all the time.”

Councillor Corey Engelsdorfer’s concerns were in the same vein.

“I keep hearing these contractor issues, and it reminds me a lot of the Wellington project, but isn’t that why we hired your firm [Colliers] to manage this project and make sure it doesn’t go off the rails like this as that seems to be what was missing in Wellington, and we were assured that when we hire firms like yours that that wouldn’t happen?” asked Engelsdorfer.

Jaber said he can advise confidently that his team has been on top of this the entire way through working with the consultants, challenging the contractor at every turn with everything they bring forward.

“In terms of what our scope of work is, we are hitting it. We are managing the contractor,” he said. “There is only so much management of a contractor… at the end of the day, they have to go and deliver the project.”

“When they are making mistakes, like slab errors and stuff, and they are complaining because it’s raining out and some of the other things, we have no control over that. All we can do is deal with it as we go, and do the best we can and we have been doing that.”

Jaber said they have been staying on top of the budget, and staying on top of the schedule.

“We’re pushing back, we are involving third party reviews every day as possible, we’ve had conversations with the lawyers, we’ve had conversations with the entire team, so in terms of our scope of work, I don’t know that there is much more we can do,” assured Jaber. “We can certainly continue to hold their feet to the fire and task, and we will continue to do so.”

CAO Adam Goheen noted how they don’t want to continue down the path of these projects not going well.

“Definitely, we need to keep a close eye on this project; it’s a $100 million and not something to sneeze at.”

Council and staff will be taking a tour of the site next week.

Jaber said they are still in the early stages of identifying mitigation strategies, noting the challenges they have are schedule recovery where they are working on recovery plans for the specific delays encountered, noting they are in discussions with the contractor to enable a 2027 completion.

The contracted date for completion is summer 2027, but Jaber confirmed completion will be beyond that date and “later in 2027, for sure”.

The project management company’s presentation, as discussed at the Sept. 10 committee of the whole meeting, can be found on the corresponding agenda item on the County’s website, along with the meeting recording.