(File photo/battlefordsNOW Staff)

By Angela Brown

Smart water meter conversion

Smart meter contract sees added cost but still within budget

Jul 27, 2022 | 3:06 PM

The City of North Battleford approved an overage to the contract cost for its smart water meter installation project at its recent meeting, due in part to some complications related to sizing the meters.

Administration noted the additional cost is still within the city’s existing budget.

According to director of operations Stewart Schafer’s report, the city previously awarded the contract to KTI Limited for the cost of $2.09 million to convert the manual meters to smart meters in North Battleford. The firm’s contract also indicated if the city required additional assistance for services, beyond installing or purchasing the meters, this would be considered outside the original contract.

The city budgeted $3 million for the full AMI [Advanced Metering Infrastructure] water meter project. The finance department indicated the city has spent about $2.3 million plus taxes on the work to date. To fund the project, $2.5 million is coming from gas tax revenue and the remaining $500,000 from reserves. About 95 per cent of the conversion is complete.

Council approved a resolution put forward to authorize an increase to KTI Limited’s current contract in the amount not to exceed $318,000 including PST, to be funded within the approved project budget to complete the AMI system smart meter conversion program.

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Schafer confirmed the project is about $100,000 over the contracted amount to cover the additional meters that needed to be ordered. The other $200,000 is required as a separate charge to deal with the five per cent of meters the city hasn’t been able to change, so KTI will be contracted to shut the water off for these properties.

On the need for the additional meters, he said some more meters had to be ordered as they were not in the Vadim water meter database that was given to KTI, including meters for city buildings.

As well, some meters being installed at properties were the wrong size so new meters had to be ordered.

“These are little items that are coming up that must be rectified,” Schafer said.

In some cases the city’s finance department preferred to have a second meter also installed for certain properties.

For example, the BGC Battlefords (the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Battlefords) has a spray park that is operated by the city.

As a result, an additional meter was required for this property to determine how much water the club used, separate from the water used for the spray park.

“A second meter will be placed in there so that we can estimate what’s going into the spray park, and then deduct that from the actual meter reading going into the Boys and Girls Clubs. So it’s little items like this that we were unaware of when the project was first pulled out for an RFP [Request for Proposal],” Schafer said.

Council approved the resolution for the added costs to the KTI contract.

Mayor David Gillan noted administration will need to vet every invoice for these extra costs from KTI just to ensure the city agrees with them.

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Angela.Brown@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @battlefordsNOW