Coun. Donna Skelly is on the warpath over budget overruns at a municipal affordable housing project that saw estimates for parking lot upgrades soar from $350,000 to $1.1 million.

The increases include a consultant payout originally pegged at $9,950 that zoomed to a whopping $115,325.

"It was an unmitigated disaster from the get-go." Skelly said. "This project, which should have been done by now, hasn't even started.

"There's no shovel in the ground and $115,000 has been spent on consulting work for a parking lot."

Fortunately, the consulting fee is the only money that has changed hands. The rest of the work was put on ice last fall when Skelly garnered council support for an audit of the CityHousing Hamilton (CHH) project at Mohawk Gardens, a 169-unit seniors building in her central Mountain ward.

The results of that audit go before councillors Wednesday. It isn't exactly comforting reading for taxpayers.

Auditor Charles Brown concluded CHH contravened its own oversight and procurement policies and failed to properly plan, scope and cost the project at 395 Mohawk Rd. E.

The report notes that CHH broke its own policy by hiring a consulting firm without getting three written quotes and for not having a formal written contract spelling out the company's duties and responsibilities.

The CHH manager in charge of the project no longer works for the social housing agency. But Tom Hunter, CHH chief executive officer, accepts that the buck stops with him.

"There were a lot of moving parts in this, but at the end of the day I need to take responsibility and accountability for what happened around the procurement process," Hunter said.

"We have a responsibility to spend these dollars properly … we should have followed the process. It didn't happen. Certainly moving forward we're revising policies so that we can trust that this doesn't happen again."

Council committed money for the project from the Ward 7 area rating fund in October 2015. Skelly, elected in a March 2016 byelection, inherited the file from her predecessor Scott Duvall.

After asking questions, she realized the project was "out of control" when she discovered the approved consulting budget of $9,950 had skyrocketed to $115,325 and the estimated construction cost had surged to $1.1 million from $350,000.

"People didn't know who was overseeing it and how much money had been spent," Skelly said. "What bothers me is, at what point would it have stopped and why was there no oversight?"

It also rankles that CHH, which has an annual multimillion-dollar capital repair deficit, is notoriously strapped for cash. "But we just spent $115,000 on the design for (29) parking spots."

Besides the expansion and various improvements to the parking lot, the project included relocating the entrance.

The audit notes that within one month of council approving the funding, it became clear there were going to be additional costs because of misunderstandings over design and construction responsibilities. Yet CHH didn't attempt to clarify the city's financial role or the impact on the overall budget.

CHH later approved amending the consultant's work and fee to reflect the new requirements but failed to re-evaluate the business case and funding options, or perform due diligence on the project's costs, design work and estimated construction costs provided by the consultant.

Now that the audit is complete, Hunter says CHH will consult with Skelly on what happens next.

Meanwhile, it probably goes without saying that the Mohawk Gardens audit distressingly dovetails with the recent value-for-money audit that found that managers across all city departments regularly overspend on hiring external consultants and routinely fail to provide oversight on their use.

It's no less painful to hear a rookie like Skelly say that the longer she's a councillor, the more she realizes how often the city tends to blindly overpay for the projects and services it delivers.

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