It was in December Yorkton Council discussed that The City of Yorkton’s Public Works Department was in the middle of a crisis. Their building was no longer habitable, and the 75 people on staff have to be relocated for safety reasons.
The problem with the facility came down to contamination. Environmental testing confirmed the presence of petroleum-based hydrocarbons at the site. As a result, the city’s fleet staff had been relocated to a different property on Sixth Ave. North, while the administration staff was waiting for construction site trailers so they could move out of the facility.
The solution offered by Public Works in December was to build a new facility, referred to as the City Operations Centre. This facility would combine the bulk of the city’s core services in one location, including water, sewer, drainage, curbs, sidewalks, roadways and streets, signs, traffic, fleet operations, inventory, facility maintenance, landfill, garbage collection and recycling, parks, horticulture, forestry, outdoor fields, cemetery and administration for all of these areas.
And the need for a new building was not a surprise since the project had been in the works since 2010, given the city’s building assessment indicated that the public works building was a priority for replacement.
The project had a cost accepted by Council as part of its 2020 budget, and went to Council following the December meeting.
The tenders, 10 in total, a near unheard response to a single project, were received, the lowest at $16,750,000, below the already accepted budget amount.
A project that was needed to the point Council accepted a budget, should have been a rubber stamp, slam dunk for the low tender being accepted, and the long awaited, and required project moving forward.
The project looked even better given the current low interest rates.
The Bank of Canada has recently lowered interest rates by half a percent in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and it is expected to lower it further, explained Ashley Stradeski, Director of Finance, with the City at the regular meeting of Council Monday.
The United States has lowered theirs by a full one per cent, he added.
“On a project of this size, a one percent decrease in interest rates, over a 20 year mortgage loan of $14,000,000, would have a net impact of reducing our total cost of financing by $1.8 million over the payment term,” said Stradeski.
In recent memory no edition of Council has approved a budget on a project, then rejected it after tenders came in on, or under budget. In this case planning was such money could be borrowed and payments made without increases to city taxes too.
Even the Yorkton Chamber of Commerce were in support by seeing the project as an economic stimulus in a COVID-19 world.
This should have followed that quite natural trend.
But it did not.
Four members of Council, Ken Chyz, Quinn Haider, Mitch Hippsley, and Darcy Zaharia dug in and voted down a motion to accept the low tender that would have allowed the project to move forward.
Trent Mandzuk – Director of Public Works with the City told Council there is no alternate plan. Why would there be for a project where Council had approved a budget which tenders matched?
Moving forward there can be little appetite by City Administration to do the work on any major plan if it may be rejected at the 11th hour.
The decision to quash the new building also raises the question what major project is worth moving forward on, if not to replace an unsafe building and to consolidate assets in a single facility?
Why replace the Kinsmen Arena, even though it’s on near borrowed time?
Does the city ante up dollars for a new hospital at some point, or can we get by with band-aid solutions like those Council left the city with for public works? Yes, this might be hyperbole, but it does illustrate the strange situation a questionable decision leaves.
The four nay votes have painted the City into a corner, with no plan how to get out of that corner to build a facility that has been needed for a decade already.
