TORONTO

The Queens Quay revitalization won’t be finished this year.

Waterfront Toronto officials revealed Wednesday that the project that has already gone almost $36 million over budget won’t be finished by June as they had claimed earlier and now likely won’t be 100% completed until 2016.

The revelation came at the same board meeting where Deputy Mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong continued to question Waterfront Toronto’s project budgeting.

The Queens Quay project will only be “around 98% complete” by the June 19 opening event due to additional Toronto Hydro work that has to be done at the intersection of Queens Quay and Rees St.

Hydro wants to lay more cables through the intersection to carry additional power for the area. Due to that work, Waterfront Toronto won’t have enough time to complete construction in the area before the Pan Am Games in July so staff are planning to do temporary fixes to make the area presentable and then to finish the project the following year.

Waterfront Toronto CEO John Campbell said they were advised by hydro about the work late last year.

“That work is underway now, they’ll complete it but it won’t give us enough time to put in the permanent finishes prior to the games opening,” Campbell said.

“They’ll have to do some temporary work and come back afterwards to put the permanent finishes in.”

Waterfront board chairman Mark Wilson said it was “too soon to know” if there would be added costs to the project with the delay.

“Obviously, we’ll work to deliver the overall project within the original budget,” Wilson said. The final work that won’t get done until after the games includes concrete paving stones south of Queens Quay on Rees St., trees and silva cells in the area to the south side of Queens Quay and Rees and red granite paving stones in some spots on the pedestrian promenade around the intersection.

During Wednesday’s meeting, Minnan-Wong — a new member of the Waterfront board — questioned the cost of several projects and where they are over budget.

“Waterfront Toronto can be better and should be better and needs to be better as it relates to creating budgets and sticking to those budgets,” Minnan-Wong said.

“They want the three levels of government to sign off on multi-million dollar projects … coming out of that meeting, you really wonder how good those numbers are.”

Waterfront Toronto’s track record on budgets has been good “with the exception of the Queens Quay project,” Wilson said.

“Once we commit to a project, our track record has been good,” he said.

Campbell added that the last 19 Waterfront projects were 3.5% under budget overall.

“We’ve invested the government money very, very carefully and we watch it very carefully,” he said.