The crowd wants blood.
In British Columbia’s municipal circles, the knives are out for Metro Vancouver Commissioner and Chief Administrative Officer Jerry Dobrovolny. The narrative broadcast by local media and posturing politicians is simple: the $3.86 billion cost overrun on the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant is a personal failure of leadership. Fire the man at the top, install a new face, and the regional district's problems will vanish.
This narrative is a lie. It is a comforting, simplistic fiction designed to protect the true culprits of this systemic collapse.
Firing Dobrovolny is pure political theater. It is a performance designed to give outraged taxpayers the illusion of accountability while leaving the machinery of failure completely intact. If the Metro Vancouver Board of Directors votes to terminate his contract, they will not be fixing the problem. They will be sweeping their own incompetence under a very expensive rug.
The Myth of the Single Bad Actor
We love to blame individuals for systemic failures. It is easier for the human brain to process a villain than a broken system.
When a multi-billion-dollar megaproject fails, the public demands a head on a spike. In this case, that head belongs to Jerry Dobrovolny. He is the highly paid bureaucrat at the helm of an organization that allowed a sewage plant budget to balloon from $700 million to nearly $4 billion.
But replacing a CAO does not rewrite the laws of infrastructure procurement. I have watched governments blow hundreds of millions of dollars playing this exact game. A project goes sideways. The budget explodes. The politicians who approved every single step of the disaster suddenly catch collective amnesia. They point their fingers at the highest-ranking staff member, hand them a massive severance package funded by taxpayers, and declare a new era of responsibility.
Then, the next project fails in the exact same way.
The North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant was not sunk by one man’s mismanagement. It was doomed by structural, systemic flaws in how Metro Vancouver plans, budgets, and executes regional infrastructure.
The Iron Law of Megaprojects
To understand why firing the CAO is a useless gesture, you must understand the iron law of megaprojects.
Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, the world’s leading authority on major infrastructure, has documented thousands of projects globally. His data shows that 9 out of 10 megaprojects go over budget. They are not over budget because of bad luck; they are over budget because of systematic bias and structural misaligned incentives.
The North Shore project suffered from three fatal flaws that no CAO could have single-handedly averted:
- Optimism Bias: The initial $700 million estimate was a political number, not a realistic engineering number. It was put forward to make the project palatable to voters and senior government funding partners.
- The Contractor Divorce: Terminating the contract with Acciona Infrastructure in 2022 was a high-stakes gamble. While Metro Vancouver claimed performance failures, terminating a major contractor mid-stream instantly destroys your leverage. The subsequent retendering occurred during a period of historic inflation, supply chain chaos, and labor shortages.
- Scope Creep: Wastewater treatment technology is highly specialized. Changing environmental regulations and regional demands forced constant design modifications.
When you cancel a contract, litigate, and retender in a hostile economic climate, the price tag does not just go up—it compounding exponentially. Any CAO sitting in that chair would have faced the same brutal market realities.
The Part-Time Board Paradox
The deepest, most radioactive secret of Metro Vancouver is its governance model.
Metro Vancouver is not governed by a board of professional corporate directors or infrastructure experts. It is governed by a board of 40-plus municipal politicians. These are mayors and councillors elected to run cities like Burnaby, Surrey, Richmond, and Vancouver.
They are part-timers. They meet once or twice a month. Their primary focus is getting re-elected in their home municipalities. Yet, they are tasked with overseeing a massive regional utility district with a multi-billion-dollar capital plan.
Ask yourself:
- How many of these board members have ever delivered a major infrastructure project?
- How many of them understand the difference between a Design-Build contract and an Alliance model?
- How many of them actually read the thousands of pages of engineering reports placed on their desks?
The answer is close to zero.
The board members rely entirely on staff, yet when things go wrong, they play the victim. They claim they were "kept in the dark" or "misled." This is a pathetic abdication of duty. They signed off on the budgets. They approved the contract terminations. They wanted the glory of cutting ribbons, but they refuse to own the dirt when the ground caves in.
If the board fires Dobrovolny, they are firing their own shield. Without him to take the blame, they will have to look in the mirror.
The True Cost of the Guillotine
Let’s talk about the practical consequences of firing Jerry Dobrovolny.
First, there is the cash. Dobrovolny’s contract undoubtedly contains a substantial severance clause. Taxpayers are already facing skyrocketing utility bills to pay for the North Shore plant. Firing him means writing a taxpayer-funded check for hundreds of thousands of dollars to exit his contract early.
Second, it triggers an organizational vacuum. Finding a replacement who is willing to step into a toxic, highly politicized regional district will take twelve to eighteen months. No top-tier utility executive in North America is going to rush to apply for a job where the board will throw you under the bus the moment a project hits macroeconomic headwinds.
Third, a new CAO will immediately halt progress. The very first thing a replacement does is order a "comprehensive independent review" of every single active project. They do this to protect themselves, establishing a baseline so they cannot be blamed for existing messes. This review process will pause construction, delay timelines, and trigger contract disputes with active builders.
By firing the leader to "save money," the board will inevitably add tens of millions of dollars in delay costs to the region’s taxpayers.
Dismantling the Premise of the Outrage
Let's address the questions that critics and taxpayers keep asking, and look at the uncomfortable truths behind them.
Why did the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant cost so much?
Because Metro Vancouver used an outdated procurement model and failed to account for market capacity. They attempted to transfer all the risk to a private contractor via a fixed-price contract. When the contractor couldn't deliver under those terms, the project stalled.
When you force a contractor to take on risk they cannot manage, they either walk away or fail. Metro Vancouver had to step in, take back the risk, and pay the real market price in a hyper-inflated economy. The $3.86 billion figure is not an error; it is the brutal, unvarnished market cost of building that facility today.
Should Jerry Dobrovolny be fired?
No. Not because he is blameless, but because his termination is a distraction. If he is replaced, the underlying governance structure remains exactly the same. The part-time board of municipal politicians will still be running the show. The procurement processes will still be broken.
Firing him gives the public a false sense of closure, allowing the structural rot to persist unchallenged.
How do we actually fix Metro Vancouver?
You do not fix Metro Vancouver by changing the CAO. You fix Metro Vancouver by stripping municipal politicians of their control over regional utilities.
We must transition Metro Vancouver's utility operations to an independent, professionalized corporate board, similar to BC Hydro or the Vancouver Airport Authority. We need engineers, corporate finance experts, and megaproject specialists making decisions—not local mayors looking for soundbites for their next election campaign.
The Path Forward
The obsession with Dobrovolny's employment status is a symptom of a lazy political culture. It is easier to demand a firing than to undertake the hard, dry work of restructuring regional governance.
If Metro Vancouver's board members were serious about protecting taxpayers, they would stop calling for resignations and start calling for an independent audit of the regional district's governance model. They would advocate for provincial intervention to hand major utility projects over to specialized crown corporations like the Transportation Investment Corporation (TI Corp), which actually possess the capability to deliver megaprojects.
But they won’t do that.
They will continue to post on social media, express their "outrage," and demand the head of their CAO. They will do this because they want you to look at Jerry Dobrovolny, and not at them.
Do not let them off the hook. The failure on the North Shore is not the story of one bureaucrat who stayed too long. It is the story of a regional government system that was never built to handle the realities of modern infrastructure. Firing the pilot does not fix a plane with no engines.
