Yehuda Bar-On, CEO of NTA, which is managing the light rail project in Tel Aviv, told the Knesset Economic Affairs Committee yesterday, "The systems tender was published in 2012, and we opened the envelopes in November 2016. A tender process that takes more than four years is not a normal procedure in a normal country. It's a sick tender. Since we are still in a tender process, I cannot give all the details."
Bar-On, who took up his post in 2014, stuck to the line taken by NTA in the past two months, and undertook to meet the October 2021 target date for launching the light rail project's Red Line. "We are still in a tender process and we have summoned the company with the lowest bid to a hearing, in accordance with which the tenders committee will make a decision. Whatever the tenders committee decides, whether to continue or to cancel, we have alternatives available such that by October 2021 we will be ready to become operational. As CEO of NTA I am familiar with the details and I am overseen by many agencies, and I say that we maintain our view that the Red Line will start to operate in October 2021, with the full backing of the minister of transport."
One of the explanations that Bar-On gave for being able to meet the timetable was fairly surprising: "The project is not a complicated one from an engineering point of view. Similar projects have been carried out in hundreds of places. There is no complexity in the project that is not recognized, that has never been dealt with and is not known."
On cost, Bar-On said, "We could have chosen the easy path and not have invited the bidder to a hearing, despite the sick tender, but instead to have said to our colleagues in the Finance Ministry Budgets Division 'take it or leave it'. Add to the budget of you want. But that is also the least responsible path. We know for sure that the bid we received in the systems tender is out of line with prices in similar tenders in other places around the world. The prices are not market prices."
Economic Affairs Committee chairman MK Eitan Cabel recalled that in 2011 NTA claimed that the Red Line would start to operate in 2017, at an investment of NIS 10.7 billion, while the launch date has been postponed by four years and the budget has grown by NIS 6 billion, and counting.
A substantial part of the committee session was devoted to the situation of businesses in the vicinity of the work on the Red Line. Adv. Roi Cohen Lahav, president of Lahav, which represents small and medium-size businesses, claimed that 50% of the businesses on the route of the line had already closed down, collapsed, or gone bankrupt, "And no-one cares. Look at the Israeli government's double standards: six weeks ago the Amona crisis threatened to break up the government. Ministers and Knesset members and the prime minister himself were all busy worrying about compensation for the residents of Amona. Forty families that built on private land without authority will receive compensation of hundreds of millions because they have a political party, and the small businesses on the light rail route are thrown to the dogs. It won't be investigations or cigars or champagne that will topple this government, but its imperviousness and malice towards a sector that is the heart of the Israeli economy," Cohen said.
In summing up the session, Cabel harshly rebuked the representative of the Ministry of Finance Budgets Division, Alon Messer, for the ministry's unwillingness to provide solutions. "It's a NIS 17 billion project, and NIS 100 million couldn't be found to compensate businesses owners?" he asked. Messer responded, "First of all, in most similar projects around the world there is no financial compensation. Secondly, these are not the only works in the urban fabric. This morning I was at Dizengoff Square that is being demolished, and the shops have to wait eighteen months."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on January 10, 2017
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