100%
My local council is constantly lying to the public regarding projects, Here's 3 examples:
Project A - Innercity retail park made from containers - they said would cost £300,000 and would make profit. Actually cost close to £800,000 and not fully completed before being abandoned because no-one thought to check for utilities hook up availability. Ended up being powered by diesel generators at a time when diesel fuel prices were sky high. In a city with a CLEAN AIR ZONE charging drivers to enter the city.
Project B - Part of the their 'grey to green' scheme. Demolishing an old abandoned market building, uncovering the old castle ruins & turning it into a city park. Estimated cost £2mil. Currently sat at £4.7mil spent and expected to exceed £9mil. Blamed on "complications brought by the existing (and well documented) river culvert"
Project C - Temporary closure of a central road & key bus-only route for 18 services allowing disabled/elderly/infirm direct access to the city centre. Closure was billed for "social distancing" during Covid. As soon as restrictions were lifted Council decided that it was now closed for "active travel scheme" (walking/cycling) & refused to reopen the road.
The diversions that were foisted on the buses sent them all down one road which now the council claim is "congested & has seen a massive spike in pollution" - Duh!
Re point A.
That doesn't just happen to councils, in Nottingham IIRC Games Workshop built a big new factory complex having apparently been told there was power for it, then had it sit largely idle for a long time as when it came time to hook it up the electricity board didn't have the capacity (I think due to other construction) and if what I've heard is true basically said it would cost many millions to do the final hookup as the company would have to cover all the cost of the additional works needed to upgrade the incoming supply.
In the end I think they put a load of solar up on the roofs of their buildings and waited for the electricity board to build the capacity for other projects.
A lot of construction projects run into real issues with things like utilities as the likes of the electricity companies can charge you for any upgrades they need to do in order to supply you if they are above the normal stuff, and whilst they can state when you are planning your project that there is capacity, they don't have to reserve it for you, and can use it for other projects that get built before yours or if they run into problems themselves.
There is a very good reason when the likes of a supermarket gets an extension they would often also spend the money to update all the existing lighting and other electrical appliances as the cost of getting the electricity board to increase their supply can often be 7 figures or more (the fact it also reduces long term overheads also helps). IIRC the cost of moving from one level of incoming supply to the next level up can be absolutely eye watering, even if it only needs a line from a nearby main substation.
Project B is another one, sounds simple and like incompetence, but in reality the first time you actually know what is going on at a site that hasn't been documented recently, is often when you clear it at which point you can easily find that the old documentation is wrong, either because of errors in copying over time, or because something wasn't put down where it was meant to be 100 years ago, or because stuff simply wasn't added to it.
BT are/were pretty much the poster child for properly documenting utilities, as they kept very meticulous records and updated them in a very organised fashion (IIRC they had something like 3-5 sets of everything, the engineers set for site use, a local depot set, a regional set and a central archive set) with any changes being very quickly passed on to all records.
They still lose track of minor things like access covers, as other utilities and builders don't necessarily tell BT when they tarmac over the access point, and points of reference chance (the road might have been widened/narrowed, what had been grass might now be hedges etc)...
We had a bunch of BT people over a few weeks wandering around our street a couple of years back, finally one of them was going door to door as they'd been trying (and failing) to find the access point to a bundle of underground cables in order to give one of the neighbours a new line, in the end they took the wiring to the neared access point they could find and put up a pole instead to run fibre to the neighbour (and now to about 3 others).
For a lot of utilities and other stuff, if it's underground you might be lucky if the old maps of the site are accurate to within 30 feet if it's not been mapped in decades.
One of my friends used to do work mapping out the geology of construction sites, and as he puts it "you never know what is under the topsoil", in some areas you'll clear an old building and find that there can be all sorts of issues that were not known about because when it was last built on they either didn't exist (subsoil erosion etc), or no one thought about them. IIRC there are large areas where any new building now requires full geological surveys despite having been built on for centuries, because they've had things like sinkholes appear (anywhere there are old mine works is a nightmare for this).
It's one of the reasons HS2 cost so much, they had to do geological surveys all over the place and IIRC in some instances had to change the route due to the results, in others had to budget a lot more for ground prep.
