Construction on Creston’s waste water treatment plant upgrade project is a step closer to starting, after Creston town council awarded the contract to the team of Maple Reinders and Urban Systems at its regular March 27 meeting.
The joint Maple Reinders-Urban Sytems bid came in at $5,785,000, well below the $8,038,000 bid by Graham and AECOM, which was over the project’s $7.1 million budget, which will be split between the Town of Creston, and federal and provincial infrastructure grants. About $6 million of that is left after engineering studies and the installation of a bulk volume fermenter.
Within the next month, the agreement is expected to be signed by the government, and town representatives will soon meet with the Ministry of Environment to discuss the project, which will break ground in June.
To lessen costs, rather than the usual design-bid-build process, in which an engineer creates a plan and a builder bids on it, this project will use the design-build process.
“There are so many savings in it compared to the other way,” said Iain Bell, town engineering and public works director, yesterday.
With the design-bid-build process, if the builder encounters a problem with the engineer’s design, additional charges can be incurred if the engineer has to redesign that aspect. The design-build process, however, allows the engineer and builder to be in on every decision from the beginning.
When this project was initially conceived through the design-bid-build process, bidders said a new UV disinfection and office remodelling would cost too much. Both were included, however, in the Maple Reinders-Urban Sytems bid.
The team is also keeping costs down by hiring local workers, including Valleywide Concrete, Mayday Electric and Hedlund Contracting.
“They’re the one group that showed significant interest in local employment,” said bell. “They will try and source whatever they can locally. Overall, we’re hoping it will be a nice boost for some in the valley.”
The decision to approve the project team was unanimous among the five councillors who voted. Coun. Tanya Ducharme left the room for the vote, after she declared a conflict of interest because her employer, the Columbia Brewery, which pays a large percentage of sewer fees that will help cover the town’s share, was mentioned in the resolution.
A separate motion was made at the March 27 meeting to engage an individual to act as the town’s agent, who would, among other duties, conduct site visits and inspections at the project site.
“It’s a lot for us to take on,” Bell said at the meeting.
An agent of this type usually charges between one and three per cent of the project price, which could range between $60,000 and $180,000. Coun. Jerry Schmalz said he would have preferred the fee to range between one and two per cent, but joined Ducharme and Couns. Joanna Wilson, Scott Veitch, Judy Gadicke and Wes Graham in passing the motion.
Town staff expect the fee to come in at the lower end of the range as this project is not overly complex and has been planned well.
“Most of the work has been done in-house,” Bell told council.