A pleasant surprise for Quesnel City Council on Tuesday night.
Ken Coombs, the Director of Capital Works & Infrastructure, announced that the Pinecrest Water Reservoir project, came in around 983 thousand dollars under budget.
Coombs says there were a number of factors that contributed to such a large surplus…
“There was a contingency built into the application of 395 thousand dollars to cover some of the unanticipated risk and those were not required. As well the lowest tendered price was much lower than expected and just to put it into context it was 300 thousand dollars lower than the next bid and thirdly, a design refinement helped reduce the cost of the booster station upgrades compared to the original design.”
As an added bonus the City will now expand the scope of the work around this project, specifically they will now replace what is described as an old, undersized water trunk main in the Two Mile Flat area, from the Pinecrest Reservoir south along Highway 97 to Rome Avenue.
Coombs says they considered two other projects…
“We also looked at upgrade to the SCADA system that monitors our entire water and sewer systems and we also looked at replacement of a second reservoir.”
The total project is worth 3.6 million dollars.
The funding was secured through the Clean Water and Wastewater fund with the Federal Government picking up 50 percent of the tab, the province 33 percent and the municipality the remaining 17 percent.