Town officials may still be combing over the fine print of last week's provincial budget, but they are dancing with joy over the “phenomenal” savings from today's recessionary tendering process.
Last week at town council, approval was made to award a $100,947 (including GST) tender to a High River company to demolish the decommissioned sewage treatment plant, a project that had a $1.3-million budget.
The town can now pocket a cool $1.2-million savings for a rainy day.
“The variance went from $100,000 on the low bid to $1.45 million on the high bid, which is just phenomenal,” said Mayor Brian Spiller during a break at council's regular April 9 meeting. “We purposely took two extra weeks to let the engineers and administration look at it to make sure the guy with the low bid was qualified, had good references, had the ability to do the job and was comfortable with his price, and he passed all those three, and we are going to save some money here.”
Last week's announced fiscal good fortune on this year's major infrastructure projects follows the $850,000 savings the town made in February with the approved tender for the reconstruction and replacement of the northeast trunk main sanitary sewer line. The town had budgeted just over $2.1 million for that project, but accepted a bid of $1.154 million from Sylvan Lake's Urban Dirtworks.
The funding for both projects came largely from last year's approved $9- million Build Canada grant, a three-way funding partnership between the federal, provincial and municipal governments. Spiller and senior administration staff said that agreement allows the town to use the savings for necessary future work that is part of the overall scope of the approved Build Canada funding deal.
“The northeast trunk was part of one major component of the overall Build Canada grant, and if we have savings on that component, we are allowed to reallocate to another component, so sanitary relining and manhole relining, which we'll probably look into doing next year, could be the beneficiary of some of those savings,” said Craig Teal, the town's director of planning and operational services. “Or if we have additional costs that are running over in the actual reclamation of the sewage lagoon, we will allocate some of those monies over there.”
With the Alberta economy in the midst of a deep recession, competition is fierce for the work on major public works projects, as the last two significant tendering processes have proven for the town.
For the northeast trunk main sanitary sewer line project, the town received 11 bids. Council was told on April 11 the town received 19 proposals for the demolition work at the sewage treatment plant, bids that ranged from a low of the winning $100,947 bid from Shawne Excavation & Trucking, to a high of almost $1.5 million.
Council was told administration took two extra weeks to carefully examine the six lowest bids, which were all put through a stringent vetting process.
“Part of going back and talking with those six lowest bids was to make sure they fully understood and had a good game plan, and they had a good game plan,” said Teal of the winning bid, adding the vetting team, which included Tagish Engineering, was “confident” with its selection. “They were able to answer exactly what they were going to do with every single component, and crushing concrete is their core business, not trucking.”
The contract for Shawne Excavation & Trucking calls for the High River firm to complete the first stage of a three-phase project at the old sewage treatment plant. The company, which is expected to start work by the end of the month, will demolish the headworks structure, rotating biological contact building, digesters, clarifiers, utility buildings, connecting piping and drying beds.
At the April 11 council meeting, the town also gave administration the green light to issue a tender for Phase 1 of the earthworks component of the overall project, which will include moving sludge on-site to another area, extensive testing, the realigning of a site drainage channel, and construction of a stormwater management pond in the southeast corner of the area. Teal said between $1.4 and $1.6 million has been set aside for this component of the overall project.
He said it is possible the tendering process could start this year for Phase 3 of the project, the total removal of the sludge from the site. With the completion of the tendering process this year, there is the possibility the work could start this year and carry over to 2017, said Teal.
He said the estimated budget for Phase 3 is about $1.8 million. Factoring in the planned future industrial subdivision for the site, the cost in this phase could climb as high as $3 million.
Mayor Brian Spiller
"The variance went from $100,000 on the low bid to $1.45 million on the high bid, which is just phenomenal."
