How did 24 apartments cost almost as much as 50?

Kathleen Avenue’s opening gives Lambton County a chance to ask what it learned from two very different builds before construction begins at Cathcart.

Lambton County is cutting the ribbon on 50 apartments on Kathleen Avenue today. All 50 are rent-geared-to-income, and 14 are barrier-free apartments with support from March of Dimes Canada. More than 1,100 households are on the County’s housing waitlist. I’m glad these apartments are opening, and I want to know what the County learned getting them built.

Earlier this year, the County opened 24 apartments at Maxwell Park Place. The final cost reported in April was $15.4 million. The County’s forecast for Kathleen is $16.5 million. If that holds, Lambton will have built 26 more apartments for about $1.1 million more. That’s roughly $330,000 per apartment on Kathleen and $642,000 at Maxwell.

What surprised me was that Maxwell started out looking cheaper. At the original $6.1 million estimate, those apartments worked out to about $254,000 each. An addition to an existing building comes with different problems than a new build. But even if you set Kathleen aside, Maxwell still went from $6.1 million to $15.4 million for the same 24 apartments.

In an April 2023 report to councillors, County staff said the contractor hadn’t taken the results of a soils report into account when designing the foundation. Work had stopped after groundwater and organic material were found around the footings. As the job went on, problems with plumbing, electrical work and fire protection added to the delays. The County replaced the contractor in 2024. The apartments had been expected to open in 2022. Tenants started moving in this March.

The soils report made me wonder who had the job of checking that the contractor’s design accounted for what the County already knew about the site. Lambton has a Procurement and Project Management department, and its manager was among those consulted on the 2023 report. I couldn’t tell from that report who was overseeing the work on the County’s behalf, or what they could do once the job started slipping. I’d like to know how that work was organized at Kathleen, too. The County had architectural drawings before it put construction out to bid, and the contract reached substantial performance in September. What did the people working on Kathleen do that they’d want to do again?

There’s another example across town. In 2023, Ontario Aboriginal Housing Services told County council that bids for its Confederation Street development had come in $4 million over budget. It went back to the architect and reduced the size of the building by roughly 11,000 square feet while keeping all 40 apartments in the plan. That pushed back the groundbreaking. I’m interested in the choice they were able to make while the building was still on paper. They could change what they were asking contractors to build and still deliver the 40 homes they’d planned.

The County is now proposing 94 rent-geared-to-income apartments on Cathcart Boulevard. Sarnia has approved the planning and zoning changes, and the County has awarded a contract for a prime consultant. While the County works on funding, councillors have time to ask what staff learned from Maxwell and Kathleen. If the bids come back high, who can work with the architect to bring the price down while keeping the homes? If the job starts to slip after construction begins, who can act on it, and how soon will council hear?

I’d like to see those answers in the report that asks council to approve the construction price at Cathcart. By the time we’re cutting a ribbon there, the people waiting for those apartments will already know how well we did.