Metro-committee slams Amsterdam city government

Amsterdam should never have approved the construction of the North-South metro line in October of 2002, a special city council investigative committee concluded Tuesday.

The building of the new metro line under the Dutch capital has caused historic houses to subside and the city's budget deficit to explode. The construction of the metro line, the city’s fifth, was initially budgeted at 1.4 billion euros and should have been finished this year. The total costs are now estimated around 3 billion and the metro won't run until 2017.

To explain how this could have happened, a special investigatory committee was formed last spring. Five city council members interviewed those involved and wrote a report about the inadequate information, lack of control, unworkable contracts, inexperienced responsible civil servants and risks that "made the situation uncontrollable."

Committee chairman Maurice Limmen said Tuesday: "Time and again mistakes were made, throughout the process. The political desire to construct the line was paramount." Limmen not only blamed Amsterdam’s council executives, but also city council itself for giving the plans the green light at the time.

Plans to connect the north of Amsterdam to the rest of the city and -- eventually -- Schiphol airport, some 15 kilometres south of the capital, had been in the making for decades before the city council finally approved construction of the metro line. Today, the digging of the actual 7-kilometres-long tunnel under the city centre has yet to begin, but the construction of the underground stations there has already damaged the foundations of adjacent houses. On two occasions last year, buildings on the Vijzelgracht sank up to 23 centimetres and were declared unfit for habitation

The financing of the project is also controversial. The local authorities kept matters in their own hands by receiving one single amount in support from the national government. But this has meant all the budget overruns are at the expense of Amsterdam itself.

Tuesday's report is especially critical of two former city executives, Geert Dales and Mark van der Horst. Dales was responsible for the go-ahead of the line in 2002 and Van der Horst replaced him as transport executive from 2003-2006.

In 2002 Dales said the project "would not go over budget" on several occasions. The committee concluded that was unrealistic at the time. This makes Dales the personification of what the committee called: "an overly optimistic assessment of the budget and an underestimation of risks."

The city executives responsible for the initial problems of the process have left local politics a long time ago. Dales became the mayor of the northern city Leeuwarden and now chairs the higher education college InHolland. Van der Horst works as a management consultant.

The crown-appointed mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, has been in office since 2001, but the committee concluded he played only a "very limited" part in the fiasco.