In what has become our annual recap of what’s gone wrong with the enormous filtration plant being built in Van Cortlandt Park, federal authorities announced this fall that one of the plant’s primary contractors committed fraud in its reported hiring of minority and women-owned businesses.

Schiavone Construction, which performed much of the tunneling and trucking during the early phases of the filtration plant project, agreed to pay the federal government $20 million in penalties. The company now doing the bulk of the construction work on the filtration plant, Skanska, is also under investigation for similar misdeeds.

Construction of the plant, which is more than $2 billion over budget, is now being done above ground and is on pace to be completed in 2012.
Much like other problems with the plant, one of the biggest municipal construction projects in city history, Department of Environmental Protection officials brushed off the controversy. “It probably sounds familiar to some people,” the DEP’s Mark Lanaghan told the audience at a recent monitoring committee meeting, according to the Riverdale Press. “[It’s] not completely unknown in the construction industry.”