How could they have got it so wildly wrong?
That was my immediate reaction to the news last week that the cost of building Dundee’s V&A design museum had spiralled to more than £80 million.
A £31m overspend or more, if you are long enough in the tooth like me to remember the initial cost estimate of £45m for the project just seems ridiculous.
Especially when the building which is now being constructed does not project out into the Tay as originally envisaged in Kengo Kuma’s design.
It was that element of the build that was supposedly going to be the expensive part: sinking piles in fast-flowing water into the shifting sands of a silt-covered riverbed doesn’t come cheap, you understand.
Dragging it backwards on to the firm base of Craig Harbour meant the project had been de-risked.
And by de-risked, I mean made cheaper.
So how on earth did we get to the situation where costs had gone through the yet-to-be constructed roof?
Well it is simple, really: it was ALWAYS wrong.
The V&A project was taken forward on a hoped-for budget rather than a rigorously costed budget.
No doubt there was significant technical input from surveyors and engineers and academics before the original estimate was arrived at.
However, that was inevitably still finger-in-the-air stuff until a contractor with the ability to build Kuma’s design a rare beast in the UK, let alone Scotland was actually brought on board and had the opportunity to run the numbers for itself.
It was only then that things got real. It was only then that it became abundantly obvious the projected build costs were woefully short of the actual build costs.
It must have been a body blow for those hugely well-intentioned people who have spent years nurturing and cajoling the V&A dream into life.
To know that a project with the potential to redefine an entire city a place that for too long has languished in the post-industrial doldrums was in financial jeopardy must have been excruciating.
And it must have been even harder to know that the music had to be faced, and there would be inevitable, and understandable, comparisons with other projects like the Edinburgh tram saga and the building of the Holyrood parliament.
Such disasters are a club with which to beat.
But in this case, the V&A team have my sympathy.
They didn’t choose the building which they are tasked with constructing the public did.
And very few projects, if any, in Dundee’s long and proud history come shackled with the weight of expectation the V&A has on its shoulders.
Underwhelming is not an option for the V&A.
It has to be built to the very highest standards.
In fact, it has to shine, or Dundee’s beacon of hope for the future will be derided as a miserable failure.
Now, £80m is a lot of money.
However, I suspect that as a city we shall collectively look back in years to come and commend a bargain as we welcome tens of thousands of visitors to the shores of the Tay.
No one now questions the £25m it took to build Ninewells Hospital a sum which was seen as astronomical at the time do they?
As Finance Secretary John Swinney said, V&A Dundee is a national icon in the making.
Look what the Kelpies have done for Falkirk, and multiply that affect.
Look at what the millennium ‘eye’ bridge has done for Newcastle, or what the Guggenheim has done for Bilbao.
That clamour, that excitement, is what the V&A team is trying to recreate here.
The cost may be unexpectedly high, but the cost of failing to deliver on the V&A vision is higher still.