The Croton Filtration Monitoring Committee passed a resolution, 5-2, last week calling for three public officials to investigate the cost overruns that have ballooned the project estimate from $890 million to nearly $3 billion.

The Independent Budget Office (IBO), as well as the city and state comptrollers, were asked to do a thorough audit of the project.

“The question for [the] comptrollers is how we got here and how we don’t get here again,” said Father Richard Gorman, chairman of Community Board 12 and author of the resolution. “I think we owe it to the people of New York to do this.”

The chairs of the three affected community boards voted for the resolution as did representatives for two elected officials on the Committee—Borough President Adolfo Carrion and Council Member Oliver Koppell. Only Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Emily Lloyd and Bronx Parks Commissioner Hector Aponte voted against the measure.

The vote occurred after a presentation from Lloyd, which primarily consisted of a listing of projects nationwide experiencing cost overruns. “We are not sanguine about these costs,” said Lloyd. “This is a tremendous problem for us.”

The explanation clearly didn’t satisfy the Committee, particularly Dinowitz, Koppell and Gorman, who made critical speeches after Lloyd’s presentation.

Lloyd, citing limited resources, then retracted her proposals for greater transparency including twice-a-year budget updates and community roundtables with the experts who calculated the bids.

Gorman’s response: “I feel like we just got publicly spanked.”

These developments capped a year of bad news for the mammoth project. Contractors bailed, fines accumulated, construction stopped and costs soared. At the same time, community and political criticism mounted.

In the fall of 2006, the Norwood News reported that the cost of building the plant had nearly doubled from the original environmental impact study (EIS) estimate in 2003.

That revelation drew the ire of community activists and Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz who were particularly upset at the exploding costs because the DEP said building in the Bronx would be cheaper than on a much more remote city-owned industrial plot in Westchester County.

The call for an accounting of the costs grew louder as 2007 began. Critics were not placated by the DEP’s explanation that ballooning costs were the result of an unprecedented spike in construction and material prices during the past four years.

As the year played out, Dinowitz and local activists began calling for a formal probe by the Department of Investigation (DOI), the attorney general’s office and the City Council.

The DEP responded that they were, from the spring of 2007 on, working with the DOI to prevent any waste, abuse or corruption. The agency also announced that the Independent Budget Office (IBO) had conducted a review of the costs. The IBO reported that the numbers added up, but stated that they hadn’t done a cost analysis.

Meanwhile, the contractor hired to complete the biggest phase of the project – the actual building of the facility – backed out in April. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that Perini, the original contractor, was supposed to start work in February, according to a federal mandate. When it balked, New York City began accruing thousands of dollars in federal fines, compounding the rising costs.

In August, the fines finally stopped (final tally: more than $5 million) when the Swedish mega-firm Skanska took over the project and were given an order to proceed — bumping the cost of the plant up an additional $200 million because that’s where Skanska’s bid came in.

In September, Dinowitz gained some allies in his criticism of the “disastrous” filter project when eight of 11 members of the Bronx Assembly delegation agreed to call for an investigation into the rising costs.