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Roland Perry · December 13th 10, 01:03 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In message , at 12:35:38 on Mon, 13 Dec
2010, d remarked:
It's not just the maintenance costs which have to be met from revenue,
there's a huge wodge of the build cost that the county promised would
not have to be met by taxpayers.

Theres nothing quite like a local council vanity project to really waste
taxpayers money. How the hell did it ever get approval from the DoT?

It was central government that wanted the project, paying £93m out of
£116m construction cost (and half of the remainder supposedly coming fro
the developers of a housing development which became stalled in the
recession).

The problem is that as well as not getting that £13m from the
developers, the costs have risen, and the county council has now said it
needs to borrow £50m to ensue that it's completed.

Therefore the "profits" from the busway (plus any claw-back from the
contractors, which will no doubt require legal action) now have to cover
a little over £60m rather than £13m, with still no sign of any house
building in its main east-of-A14 catchment area.

And in the mean time, large amounts of "off-busy" construction has been
magic'd up from the county's other budgets, so the £116m was never going
to be an expression of the whole cost.
--
Roland Perry