U.N.’s $2 Billion Building Binge: Getting Worse While It Lobbies for $3 Billion More

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  United Nations Building in New York City.

With a $2 billion renovation of its New York headquarters building still more than two years from completion, the United Nations is already lobbying member states for some $3 billion or so for additional major building projects in New York City and Geneva.

About $2.4 billion of the total would go for construction of a new office tower in Manhattan to accommodate the world organization’s burgeoning staff. Another $590 million or so would go for yet another mammoth renovation job -- this one of the U.N.’s venerable offices in Geneva, located in the one-time  home of the ill-fated League of Nations.

And those hefty figures, gleaned from documents presented to this year’s General Assembly, are only early estimates -- and when the U.N. is involved, early building estimates are far more likely to go up than down.

The cost estimate for the U.N.’s ongoing headquarters refurbishment in Manhattan, for example, has climbed roughly 225 percent from its initial estimate of $875 million. And the price hikes there are far from over, as the U.N. tweaks and re-tweaks parts of the project.

An end-of-year analysis of the headquarters renovation project by the U.N.’s independent Board of Auditors warned that “the Board cannot provide assurance on the accuracy of the forecast costs to complete the project."

In fact, the auditors foresaw at least another $227 million in cost increases for the current headquarters renovation, and predicted that “this situation is more likely to worsen than improve.”

One reason for the continuing U.N. push for a global building boom is that whatever austerity the rest of the world faces, the world organization expects its headquarters staff to keep growing -- at a steady 1.1 percent rate annually over the two decades ending in 2034, according to a U.N. study.

That would add 3,000 people in New York City alone who will require nearly 1.9 million square feet of additional space -- hence the desire for yet another additional U.N. tower.

Meantime, its badly aging facilities in Geneva -- some of them 70 years old -- must also accommodate more staff, though the U.N. hopes to do more there through re-jigging its antiquated existing spaces.

Whether the U.N. will get the money it says it needs to accommodate the ongoing bureaucratic bulge is another matter entirely.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/11/03/gift-that-keeps-on-giving-un-lobbying-for-3b-in-future-projects-while/#ixzz1cgGuLxSq