Chair, as I indicated earlier, I'd refrain from speaking to a potential result, but I would go back and say we did indicate publicly that there would be a potential for impacts on the costs of the project should it be delayed beyond its October 5 signing.
People may wonder how that can be the case when we had a fixed-price contract, as we've indicated. The issue is that the contract was a fixed-price contract, but were it to be delayed beyond October 15 there was the potential of significant logistical construction season issues that would bring significant cost pressure to bear on the consortium living within the contract. That of course in the end does result in impacts in terms of negotiated change orders and everything else through the life of a contract.
More importantly, what was missing, I think, is that within that budget, $90 million—and this was the only risk to the city within this whole project budget, as we were taking the risk of utility locations, which were estimated to be in the order of $40 million to $50 million downtown—there were significant logistical issues, construction season issues, in terms of our ability, working with Bell Canada and the other utilities, to make those utility relocations happen in the sequence in which they needed to happen in order not to impact the timeline the consortium had the right to expect in terms of moving in and doing their construction.
So to the extent that utility relocation might be deferred, there could have been a significant impact on the overall project, and pieces of it that we, the city, did hold the risk for. That is what was being referred to in Mr. Chartrand's memos and other discussions in October about potential for cost impacts, cost overruns, if the decision to move forward with the project was delayed significantly.