CRH restoration price tag now at $14.1 billion
Published:Tuesday | March 7, 2023 | 12:17 PM
The Ministry of Health and Wellness is estimating that approximately $14.1 billion will be spent to complete the ongoing Cornwall Regional Hospital (CRH) restoration project, more than the $10.5 billion which had been stated in the recently tabled budget.
Addressing an online press conference on Tuesday morning, Dunstan Bryan, the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Health, explained that the difference in the cost estimates is based on updated information which the ministry received from the project's contractor after the budget estimate was submitted to the Ministry of Finance.
“What was provided in the estimates of expenditure for 2023/24 in terms of the estimated costs for the CRH rehabilitation represents the numbers as we had them at the time. Those numbers were inputted in the budget presentation from October of last year, when the budget call was sent out and the Ministry of Health submitted the information to the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service,” said Bryan.
“It is a time variance or knowledge variance between our information as at October 2022, and our information as at January 2023. What we are saying is that based on the information that we now have, we have now received the estimates from the selected contractor, and there is alignment between our internal estimation and what the contractor has provided,” Bryan added.
In addition to the $10.5 billion for the construction, $2.5 billion is to go toward new equipment and $1.1 billion is to go toward technical services.
Meanwhile, Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton maintained his stance that previous calls to scrap the CRH and build a new hospital facility from scratch would have been impractical at the time.
The CRH's restoration, which has been projected for completion in March 2025, was triggered by complaints of noxious fumes at the hospital building which resulted in services being relocated from the facility's first three floors in 2017.
- Christopher Thomas
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