Increasing the number of staff and overtime on the delayed new secondary school project is likely to push the overall cost over budget, the Opposition United Bermuda Party said last night.

Shadow Works Minister Erwin Adderley said Government's plans to throw additional workers and man hours at the $70 million site would not come without a steep price.

And he said despite Works Minister Alex Scott claims this week in The Royal Gazette that steps were being taken to speed up the progress of the troubled new school, he had little faith in the promises.

"The Minister has not given us any concrete information and we get no comfort whatsoever from his promises that more staff and overtime will be thrown at the development," said Mr. Adderley. "It goes without saying that if you increase overtime and employ more people to work on the site that your costs will go up massively.

"I want to know who will pay for that because I doubt that it was budgeted for in the beginning. The Minister talks about these initiatives to increase speed, but he is vague, at best, in places, and secretive in others.

"We want concrete information outlining the completion date and the cost. There has been no mention whatsoever of a critical path schedule. At least if they had that I would feel that somebody knew what they were supposed to be doing and by when."

Mr. Adderley said the critical path would chart exactly what should be completed by what date, right through from the steel work and roof to the electrics, painting and landscaping. He said all projects have them, but if initiatives are being introduced to speed up progress, a new critical path should be established. Instead, at the moment, he said he had the impression that Government did not have any timelines.

Mr. Scott said the concerns and allegations were uncalled for and untrue.

He said the project was, to date, under budget and had not employed the optimum number of people or utilised overtime as much as it could have, meaning cash saved from the past would be used now.

"We are running under budget now, and have underspent for the time we have been on that site, therefore it will be just using up that difference," said Mr. Scott. "We have been billing between $2 million and $3 million a month, but to complete on time we are going to have to be billing about $4 million a month.

"Increasing the number of workers and increasing overtime does not mean it's going to make it more costly. It was probably factored in when the budget was first conceived."

Mr. Scott said it would be highly unusual for a general contractor not to expect overtime to play a significant role in such a huge project. He added: "It's not anticipated that we are going to go over (budget) in any great sense."

He said there could have been more men on the site a lot earlier, but he said, like a graph, the project had started off slowly and built up pace. He said when the graph went into the steep curve, that was when the most workers were needed.

He added: "We are a little late getting into the steep curve. We should have been there in October or November, but it's going to be February."

And he said Government and the contractors each had a critical path, which they tried to bring together, but he said a new one was to be established in the next couple of weeks after all of the measures to speed up progress had been agreed, including getting the various contractors to work concurrently, rather than consecutively.

He added: "There will probably be a third critical path that comes out of these initiatives."

The Minister's comments were mirrored in a report on the site released by Auditor General Larry Dennis at the end of last year.

He said that by August of last year, general contractor Pro-Active Management Systems Ltd. had only received 29 percent of the total contract value.

At that point, they were supposed to be more than half way through the schedule.

The company had been paid a total of $20.25 million, but it should have received $33.5 million. He said the company had been billing, on average, about $1.4 million a month, with only the July payment last year being more than $2 million.

But the auditor said in order to meet a revised schedule for January of next year, instead of the original September 2003 deadline, Pro-Active would need to average billings of $3 million a month - a 100 percent increase.