BONNYVILLE – The MD of Bonnyville crunched the numbers and figured out how they could address the $2.8-million shortfall in their 2021 budget.
Tolulope Maraiyesa, general manager of corporate services for the MD, gave council a few options during their May 5 committee meeting to fill in the gap that was the result of a five per cent dip in their overall assessment value.
Out of the four possibilities, council opted to go ahead with completing the engineering for Twp. Rd. 610 from Hwy. 28 to Range Rd. 460, but to defer any work on the three miles of road until 2022. This was anticipated to cost the municipality $4.3-million.
“It’s not really savings, but just deferring the project,” noted Maraiyesa.
Administration explained they could complete one-mile of the road, if it was desired by council.
Coun. Marc Jubinville wasn’t in favour of the idea.
“I’d rather hold everything off until next year and maybe we can add another couple million and go a little further than the three miles,” he said.
When Coun. Dana Swigart asked if the project had been tendered, General Manager of Infrastructure Services Abid Malik said that a consultant has completed the engineering and it could be tendered. The decision was made to pause it due to the MD’s shortfall.
“With this new development, I asked them to hold off because we may decide to leave one, two, or three miles depending on what council (decided),” Malik noted.
Due to the time of year, Reeve Greg Sawchuk thought it was better to wait to tender the work until later on in the year.
“We know the best bang for our buck is putting these out in January and February. To be putting a tender at the beginning of the summer, when most of these construction companies have already got their work in line, I don’t think we’re going to get the best deal,” he detailed. “It’s probably best to put it off until next year where we can actually put it out in January. I think we’re working toward that by doing the engineering the year before, and I think we need to stress that those roads are going to be done next year and are ready to go out early.”
Swigart agreed, “There’s got to be a better way so we can tender these jobs in January and February. If that means working two years behind or whatever to have them done in the future, we have to because we could save a ton of money by doing that. We’ve done that in the past and we’ve noticed huge savings if you tender early. Somehow, we’ve got to do it.”
In order to avoid the municipality having to consider postponing more projects in the future because of a shortfall, Coun. Ben Fadeyiw requested administration make "some sort of a small forecast to what the assessment is going to be at."
“I’m not asking for an exact (number), but we do have an idea of how the assessments are going to be. If there’s going to be an extra eight per cent (reduction) or five per cent, and then we can really work on that because it’s so hard to announce a lot of these things and then take it back. We have a lot of people that are looking forward to their roads and now all of a sudden, we’re like ‘sorry, but we can’t do that.’ I think we have a lot of good people here that can probably do better on the projecting things, personally.”
The other options council could have chosen to help balance the budget were deferring the $1.5-million bridge project on Rge. Rd. 474, the La Corey recreation park for $340,000, or the train trestle staging area and paved path, which was budgeted for $220,000.
