Region to investigate Enbridge costs

By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express

After a bill came in 40 times the originally estimated price, the region wants to get some of its money back.

Durham is seeking an outside expert so see if they can recover any money from Enbridge after the cost of a gas connection originally estimated to cost $100,000 came in with a price tag of approximately $4 million.

Councillors Joe Neal and John Neal tabled a motion at regional council calling on the region to hire an outside source to determine what they can rake back from the energy company.

Joe Neal, a regional councillor from Clarington, said the costs were determined based on the incinerator being the lone user of the gas line, when in reality there will be others in the future industrial park.

“Enbridge provided a 20-year projection of their revenues from this work, and the EFW is shown as the only customer, yet if you go through some of the correspondence, they always seem to be increasing the size of this main or that main,” Neal said in council chambers. “So…if you go through it, it’s pretty obvious that they’re going to have other customers that they’re gonna have connecting to gas that is going to go through. The service is going to use the improvements that Durham Region has paid 99.9 per cent of the cost of.”

The cost of the connection, as is the case with other parts of the site, are split between Durham and York regions, with the prior covering 78.6 per cent of the cost.

Cliff Curtis, the region’s works commissioner, said that under the contract between the regions and Enbridge, if any other entities connect to the gas line in the next five years, they can file to get money back from the energy company.

Regional chair Roger Anderson said that passing a motion like the one presented by the Neals would get Enbridge back to the table faster, adding that Durham would be losing out on getting money back by narrowing itself to a five-year window.

“I think the fact that if Enbridge finds out we’re going down this route, they might come back to the table quicker. They might see something that they should’ve saw a long time ago,” he said.

The motion passed unanimously.

This was not the first time Joe Neal had called on councillors to find out why the costs to Enbridge had gone up so much. In a joint meeting between the finance and administration and works committees in February 2015, Neal put forward a motion to invite Enbridge to appear before the joint committees to explain why the cost had grown as much as it had above the original estimate. The motion failed, with Oshawa councillors John Neal and Amy England voting in favour of it.