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WASHINGTON -- The contractor that botched construction of a $75 million police academy in Baghdad so badly that human waste dripped from the ceilings has produced shoddy work on 13 out of 14 projects reviewed by federal auditors, the top official monitoring Iraq's reconstruction told Congress yesterday. In a House hearing on what has gone wrong with reconstruction contracts in Iraq, Parsons Corp. quickly became the focus, taking bipartisan heat for its record of falling short on critical projects. The Pasadena, Calif., firm was supposed to build facilities at the heart of the $21 billion US-led reconstruction program, including fire stations, border forts, and healthcare centers. But inspectors have found a litany of flaws in the firm's work. The one project reviewed by auditors that was being constructed correctly, a prison, was taken away from Parsons before its completion because of escalating costs.
An Ohio-based company in charge of maintaining D.C. police cars agreed yesterday to hire more city residents and begin advertising open jobs on the city's Web site after a complaint by D.C. Council member Marion Barry. Barry (D-Ward 8) had proposed that the maintenance contract be ended with First Vehicle Services, charging that the company was not in compliance with city law. .
Remembrance Day this year will be hard to forget for drivers facing an overnight closure of Highway 401 at Homer Watson Boulevard. Homer Watson Boulevard will also shut for the night, as workers move in to raze an old bridge over the 401. The 10-hour demolition blitz will mark the halfway point of the two-year, $19-million interchange expansion project that's brought daily gridlock to Kitchener's western Highway 401 access. News of another year of construction didn't impress Betty Allensen, who has to drive through the construction mess twice a day. "I'm so frustrated," she said yesterday, while pumping gas into her car at the Sunoco station at New Dundee Road and Homer Watson. "I don't know if I'll be glad it's over in the end or not." Her office is nearby, on the Kitchener side of the construction.
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