November 2, 2022 Update
Unfortunately, due to multiple start and stop events related with this project, heavily impacted by the excessive rain and saturation of the soil experienced this year, resource shortages, and delays in infrastructure projects province wide our project schedule has been unpredictably extended beyond any reasonable expectation of our project management team. This has resulted in a delay of private property curbstops installations to commence in spring of 2023 instead of the previously advertised fall of 2022. We know this is not what our ratepayers wanted to hear and we apologize, but the weather has not been cooperating with us this year. We all share in this frustration.
The seasonal start up predicted to commence forcemain installation in spring 2022 was delayed until mid September 2022, the originally anticipated completion for this portion of the project. While the forcemain installation delays unfolded, planning and issuing the Tender for the installation of curbstops to participating properties had its own set of challenges. Our intent was to have our Tender for the installation of the curbstops to the property lines complete before the final connection of the foremains to the system, so that the municipal system was prepared to accept the wastewaters. With delays in forcemain construction, which now has a revised schedule to complete by end of November 2022, we also had delays in going out to tender for curbstops as we needed to provide some relatively accurate dates of when the contractors would be able to begin. We published a tender that closed in early September which requested installations to occur in the fourth quarter of 2022. This Tender did not produce a competitive bid process for our ratepayers. It should be noted that contractors are limited with resources to deliver in the timeframe we had identified. We discussed this with Council and reissued the Tender with more reasonable installation dates and identified the installation to occur in the spring and summer of next year. The Tender closed by the end of September and the results shared with Council. The Tender was awarded to Southwood Ventures on October 18, 2022.
We also know there may be some potential emergency installations identified by some residents and they will be evaluated in a fair manner with discussions with the Province of Manitoba to determine if we need to do those curb stops this year and will work with those residents directly. As you can appreciate, we can not do this for everyone and will be evaluating it on a set of criteria (that we are developing) that could be applied in a fair and transparent manner, as the resources to complete them are very limited.
Council provided direction to begin the process for the Local Improvement District By-law in June 2022 as an alternate payment option for property owners. Our staff are continuing to work on this and we had hoped to have the Local Improvement Plan available for Public Consultations this fall but it requires having detailed costs related to installation of the curb stops available. This will be in place before the curbstop installations in the spring 2023.
Our goal has not changed, to get this project done as soon as possible, but we have had to adapt to very unusually difficult year.
We are excited that this long-awaited project is coming to completion soon but unfortunately, we will be waiting till this spring to commence private property curbstop installations.