Report: State hospital cannot be built more cheaply – Liechtenstein
VADUZ – The project approved by the people to build a new state hospital definitely cannot be implemented at the costs approved by the people. This is the result of the professional and technical examination commissioned by the government. The state parliament is now to decide how to proceed.
The government has taken note of the report on the professional and technical review of the new building of the Liechtenstein National Hospital and the report on the plausibility check of the preliminary project and made a decision on how to proceed, as it announced on Wednesday: The state parliament should therefore be available for the April session Report and application with the possible variants and a recommendation for further action are submitted.
After an external review of the project organization was carried out against the background of the emerging cost overruns for the new construction of the Liechtenstein National Hospital, the government completed a technical review in July 2022. The government took note of the result of this review on Tuesday. According to the announcement, the report comes to the conclusion that the project described in the original report and application for the new building cannot be implemented within the credit limit decided by referendum.
Additional costs are reduced slightly
Parallel to the professional and technical review, the steering committee had all of the existing offers checked in detail as part of a plausibility check in order to make a reliable statement on the costs incurred for the preliminary project. This report comes to the conclusion that the preliminary project with an index as of October 2021 costs CHF 94.9 million, also CHF 18.3 million more than the commitment credit of CHF 76.6 million available for the first time. The additional costs remain exorbitant, but are at least slightly lower than the CHF 21.3 million rumored in spring 2022.
In order to give the state parliament the opportunity to decide on further action against the background of these findings, a report and application with the possible variants for further action and a recommendation from the government will be prepared in the coming weeks. “Basically, there are four options available: Applying for a supplementary loan for the optimized Inspira project; applying for a new overall commitment loan for the optimized Inspira project; applying for a new overall commitment loan for a new construction project; or canceling the new state hospital building project with the corresponding consequences for the operation of the state hospital “, writes the government. The first two variants would require a project optimization in a first step, with which a cost reduction can be achieved.
The two reports are to be published as attachments to the report and application with possible variants at the beginning of March.