CANMORE – The Town of Canmore has approved a $1.9 million budget increase for a project within its Transportation Improvement Plan after administration says it hit a number of snags along the way.
Citing the cancellation of the Alberta Community Transit (ACT) grant program by the province and certain projects within the Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP20) coming in at higher costs than anticipated, the Town of Canmore moved to increase the budget as well as re-allocate funds at its regular council meeting on Tuesday (Mar. 3).
“I’m here to ask for a budget and scope amendment for the TIP20 project, more specifically that council approve a budget increase of $1.9 million for the deep utility portion,” said Chantale Blais, a municipal engineer with the Town of Canmore.
“For a total approved budget of $13, 835,000, to be funded with $665,000 from the water reserve and $1.2 million out of the wastewater reserve.”
Blais said the deep utility project, which intends to upgrade water and sewer lines between Lift Station 2 to Hospital Place, was tendered out in December 2019. Six bids were received, however, all were over budget.
“We got results in January 2020. We received six different bids – all bids were over budget,” she said.
“So we re-gathered and following some internal discussion, and discussions with our consultant as well, we decided to cancel the tender at the time. That provided us an opportunity to have discussions with the contractors that had bid on the project to better understand the tender results.”
After these discussions, Blais said there were a number of things identified that triggered the large increase in budget, explaining the higher than anticipated bidding numbers.
“The first one was the risk associated with high-ground water that all the contractors perceived to be significantly higher than we anticipated,” said Blais, adding that aside from one lift station, it’s been 25 years since deep utilities have been updated in the valley.
“So there’s fewer areas that remain for the town to dewater once we start installing utilities and so the contractors saw this as quite a risk and put a cost on it.”
Another part of the design required contractors to micro-tunnel under the CP railway tracks, which Blais said contractors saw the length of this micro-tunneling, roughly 50m, as being very short and “for them it's not necessarily worth their while.”
“It’s costing less to go longer than it would to do a short run, so they’re increasing their cost,” she said.
“We were faced as well – micro-tunnelling is quite a specialty work and few companies were doing it and they’re busy, so we were a bit vulnerable to them coming for a short run, and there being few companies doing this.”
Contractors also saw traffic accommodation, i.e., keeping a lane open on all sides to keep traffic flowing, as another issue, causing them to further raise costs. In addition, Blais said the Town originally tendered the project without a receiving pit or shaft on the east side of the CP rail tracks. Contractors, however, deemed this as too much of a risk for micro-tunnelling under the tracks so included the build of said receiving pit or shaft into their bids.
Blais said the project was retendered with a modified scope based on the information received from contractors. Instead of going all the way to Hospital Place with the waterline and the sewer line, they’d stop at Mountain Street with the same completion date in tow, allowing the contractors to suggest alternatives for micro-tunnelling. Three bids were received based on the new scope and based on the bids, still over-budget, administration requested the $1.9 million budget increase, for a total of $5.5 million for the deep utility portion of the TIP20 program.
Mayor John Borrowman asked for clarification as to this increased funding for what is turning out to be a smaller job.
“So to summarize, we’re doing less, it’s a smaller job but it’ll cost us more,” he said, which Blais confirmed as correct.
Council moved in-camera at this point, however, the increase to the budget was unanimously approved following.
“Speaking in support of that motion, I understand the … Critical nature of this program work in moving forward with all of our plans, it’s clearly, it really is critical that we move forward with this underground work," said Mayor Borrowman.
“It’s disappointing that we find ourselves in this situation where the costs are more than we anticipated but I’m satisfied that administration has exhaustively considered other options and I appreciate the direction administration is recommending in moving forward with this project.”
In addition to this, council approved a funding source revision for the Railway Avenue South Transit Corridor, another identified project within the TIP20 program.
“The TIP20 programming includes a number of council-approved projects that have been grouped into a single program for the purpose of project delivery and construction,” said Andy Estarte, the Town’s manager of engineering.
“For some background on the funding… This is for the area of work around the intersection (Bow Valley Trail and Railway Avenue), which $7 million was approved by council for construction back in December of 2018. That funding allocation included $2.8 million from a Green Trip grant. Shortly after that approval, we were working through this project and our other green trip projects… The feedback we were getting was much of the program wasn’t actually going to be eligible for Green Trip.”
Esarte said as a result administration was advised by Alberta Transportation, who administered the funds to look at applying for the ACT grant. At the time, it was a new program specifically designed to allow for the type of work planned, such as sidewalk and pathway connections for transit. Administration was successful in being approved for the grant, however, after a new government moved into place, the grant was cancelled before agreements with the Town could be put in place.
“To recover the shortfall, we’re recommending to use $700,000 in offsite levies,” said Esarte, adding it was a funding source that had previously been overlooked by administration.
“The other two funding sources are from grants that we have the ability to use for our range of project types. Gas tax grants are typically used for transportation projects or required to spend on transportation projects or Municipality Sustainability Initiative (MSI), comes from our MSI funding.”
Esarte recommended that council increase funding from offsite levy reserve by $700,000, increase funding from the federal gas tax grant by $800,000 and increase funding from MSI by $1,000,000. As alternatives, Esarte said the Town could move to reduce the scope of the Railway Avenue intersection project, though he doesn’t recommend it as an option indicating it’ll disrupt the continuity of the project.
The project is described in the council report as improving “conditions for transit, walking and cycling in the area around five major bus stops and the intersection of Bow Valley Trail and Railway [Avenue.”
“The project will include roadworks, sidewalks, pathways, local lighting, transit shelters, site furnishings, wayfinding and other related work,” the report said.
Borrowman said he supports the decision to revise the funding sources for this particular project, stating disappointment in the disappearance of the ACT grant.
“I appreciate how important this particular project is, it’s sort of the keystone to everything else we want to do. Without this being in place, as I understand it, much of the following work that we’ve been talking and planning about just wouldn’t work,” he said.
“I appreciate this as a critical piece in the puzzle, we’re not talking about an increase to the cost of the project, just sourcing it through different funds. It’s disappointing that the ACT grant disappeared.”
The overall TIP20 program budget was currently $11,935,000, which includes $8,330,000 in surface works projects and $3,650,000 in utility projects. The $1.9 million increase brings the budget up to $13, 835,000.
