INNISFAIL — Six months after the first shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, a report of building activity in town for the first eight months of the year shows the municipality is holding its own.
Meghan Jenkins, the town’s manager of community planning and sustainability, presented a report to town council at its Sept. 8 agenda and priorities meeting. She said building permit statistics for the first eight months of 2020 showed the town is on track to be close to 2019 end-of-year figures.
“I don’t think we will be far off,” said Jenkins.
She told council that for the first eight months of 2020, the municipality has seen a total building permit value of almost $4.6 million. The total building permit value for the first eight months of 2019 was nearly $7.7 million.
While permit value is respectable, the total number of permits for all types, including residential, commercial and industrial, was less optimistic.
“We are definitely down in permit numbers, for sure,” said Jenkins, noting that as of Sept. 8, the town had received 67 for the first eight months of 2020. “Usually, we would be hitting that number some time in June.”
She said the municipality did not see any “big ticket” building permits in 2020 as it did in recent years, such as one for the $21.5-million Autumn Grove project in 2018, or the new $3.5-million EQUS headquarters last year.
However, she said the commercial activity in the town is still doing “all right,” with the bulk of permits coming for the new $1.5-million, 5,000-square-foot Mainroad Contracting shop in the town’s west end industrial park, the new $385,000 chalet at the Innisfail Ski Hill, as well as internal improvements at NoFrills.
Jenkins said the total commercial building permit value for the first eight months of 2020 was a little more than $3 million.
She said the value of industrial building permits for the same period was $32,200, with no construction activity at all for any institutional projects.
With residential, including renovations, the municipality recorded a little more than $1.5 million worth of building permits for the first eight months of 2020.
Jenkins said stats reveal the town is seeing far more permits for home improvements than in recent years.
“We are already almost double what we did all of last year for those types of projects, in the home renovation, garages decks category,” she said.
For all of 2019, the town recorded building permit values of $459,300 for garages, decks and renovations, while for the first eight months of 2020 there was close to $1.05 million.
