Paving Merchants Street in Valletta in natural materials has been found to be more of a problem than expected and is holding up completion of the work, according to the Works Division, which has issued a statement in reply to media reports about difficulties encountered with the paving tender.
MLP spokesman for public works Charles Buhagiar said the saga proved what a lack of planning there was, and how incompetent the Nationalist government was.
The Works Division said that the project for upgrading Merchants’ Street and other streets in Valletta consisted of various stages, namely:
1. Scarifying of existing road/pavement surfaces, which were in a very poor state of repair.
2. Excavation of trenches in relation to shifting and installation of new services, ie, water, electricity, rainwater culverts, Melita Cable and telephones.
3. All work related to new services in collaboration with the various utility providers.
4. Construction of concrete sub-base.
5. Paving in natural materials.
To date, work on the first four items have been almost completed for the stretch of Merchants’ Street extending from Archbishop Street to Melita Street, and St John’s Square. From experience with similar projects, these activities normally represent the most labour and machinery-intensive work on such projects on site. On this particular project, this work had been completed in a satisfactory manner with the cooperation of the business community of the area in question.
The work formed part of a detailed overall programme of work and it was essential that the infrastructural work was carried out before the commencement of the paving work. In fact, the paving tender was published on 13 April, and infrastructural work on site was started on 11 May.
Eventually, the division said, the submission of offers for the paving tender closed on 5 June 2007. Because none of the bids submitted was fully technically compliant, the General Contracts Committee decided on the cancellation of this call for tenders and eventually recommended that a negotiated procedure be initiated with an “amended” technical documentation.
This negotiated procedure was halted in view of the fact that one of the bidders submitted a formal objection to the decision to cancel the original tender. The appeal was heard on 17 August in front of the Public Contracts Appeals Board.
The Adjudication Board was bound to process the tender in conformity with the published specifications. The board could not change the parameters in any way or manner to accommodate any values that were lower than those specified in the original tender. At this stage it is pertinent to highlight the fact that one of the specified (porfido) figures was on the high side, to the extent that none of the submitted offers complied with this particular requirement. This fact per se confirmed that this particular specification requirement was rather difficult to achieve.
“Every effort is being made by all the parties involved to find an early solution to this problem so that this project can proceed without further delays,” the division said.
In his statement, Mr Buhagiar said the work was creating clouds of dust in the height of the tourist season. It was an inconvenient situation for shop owners, for tourists and even for monti open air market hawkers.
Now the problem has become even more complicated, said Mr Buhagiar, because it is known that the paving material has not even been imported yet. Work has had to stop half-way through the project.