North Battleford City Council meets over Zoom. (Angela Brown/battlefordsNOW Staff)

By Angela Brown

Total cost at $15.16 million

City’s Primary Sanitary Sewer Trunk Upgrade project to cost $1.5 million more than previously estimated

Jan 27, 2021 | 6:19 PM

The City of North Battleford plans to send a letter to the province requesting some support or an exemption for the PST cost on construction for the city’s large-scale Primary Sanitary Sewer Trunk upgrade infrastructure project currently underway.

With this PST cost and other increased costs in the latest update, the project is now estimated at $15.16 million in total.

“Council has requested that we send a letter to Saskatchewan Finance, because that is who administers the PST, to discuss our particular case,” Mayor David Gillan said. “It’s a little bit of a unique case because we started this project before there was a requirement for us to pay PST on construction costs. That has come in since, so it is just a request. We are hoping maybe we will find somebody that can assist us. At this point it is just a request, because of the extenuating circumstances.”

Sean Bayer, of KGS Group – the project managers on the sanitary sewer twinning project, gave an update of the project costs to council at this week’s meeting, reflecting anticipated extra costs for the initiative.

The new estimate includes the additional costs of $745,000 anticipated for construction PST and $761,743 for increases in cost estimates, including contingency costs and other estimated costs, which together add up to about $1.5 million more projected than the prior total estimate.

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“The PST on a project like this has historically been refunded. However, in 2017 that changed, and it now needs to be recognized for future projects of this nature as an eligible cost for a project,” Bayer said in his report.

The province started charging PST on construction in 2017.

Bayer said close to 90 per cent of the detailed engineering design work on the project has been completed as of this month.

The submitted cost estimate in 2017 for the project totalled $13,656,530 — a value that has been approved by the provincial and federal governments. Based on this earlier figure, the federal and provincial governments were committed to contribute about two-thirds for their funding share, through the New Building Canada Fund program.

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angela.brown@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @battlefordsnow