This is what you get when your LACMTA planning management, staff, and contractors fail to do a proper advanced project planning, like failure to do a complete sub surface survey of existing structures and utilities.

It's what happens when you let a bid, with the same "cost plus" change order expectations that the contractor will make a higher rate of profit on each change order, than the rate of profit for the original supposedly "competitive" (or even deliberately "low balled") bids.

The good news is that the person who was originally responsible for that is gone now... Not that I've seen any evidence that that person has been replaced by anyone more competent, which is the bad news.

This is what happens when your agency fails to do "due diligence', and contractors are given an "incomplete" plan and design to work from. But, it's "okay", we "know" that, but we'll pay you for the changes later.

This is what happens, when instead of using a true "design build" contract, which would have had a higher "bid" price, but where the contractor would have had to take more of responsibility and risks, including his own "due diligence" for such things, in order to complete the project within the original bid.

This is unlike how we did construction using "design build" approach for all of the previous Gold Line projects, which came in on budget. Of course, those segments, were built by the GL Construction Authority, for MTA, not directly by the MTA itself.

It is what happens when your staff lies to your political leadership, and your political leadership lies to itself, and those politicians makes promises to build everything for everyone, without having the proper staffing, oversight, or internal controls to manage so many projects simultaneously.

So the MTA kind of just washed its hands of the need for qualified and effective public "oversight" and farmed it out to construction management contractors, kind of like the CAHSRA fiasco. And then, you have contractors managing contractors, based on the percentage of work they "manage", which when you really think about it, actually "rewards" screw ups and improper oversight, with more "profits", from the additional "work" you're managing....

It is what happens when you have a shrinking working age population (the demographic baby "bust" of the 1990's) especially with tens of thousands of experienced but aging baby boomers retiring from a "boom and bust" cycle industry like construction, that didn't hire or train nearly enough folks during the last 10 years, for the sheer "quantity" of work that is now here.

So since they ran into the sub soil issues nearly five years ago, when pre-construction utility relocation started, and were already nearly 200% over budget at the very start just for utility relocations, this is not really as big a surprise to me, as it seems to be to Laura Nelson...