July 11, 2012

Yellowknife embarks on a five-year infrastructure building spree

PETER KENTER

correspondent

Recent changes in water quality regulations have prompted the City of Yellowknife to initiate a massive five-year infrastructure blitz.

The city had been accumulating funds for several years to build a water treatment plant at some point in the future.

Those plans were accelerated when the Government of the Northwest Territories issued new public water supply regulations in 2009, essentially adopting federal drinking water guidelines.

“We have a high-quality water source in the Yellowknife River, with only one recent turbidity event during the summer,” said Mark Heyck, a city councillor and deputy mayor of Yellowknife.

“However, while we already chlorinate the water, the new regulations require membrane filtration of surface water sources.”

Any enforcement of the new regulations would be suspended, provided the city continued to move forward on the new treatment plant.

Work on the plant site began in 2011, near existing reservoirs, with construction of an access road.

However, given current low interest rates, the city recently decided to borrow $20 million for full completion of the treatment plant and to use the existing accumulated funds of $17 million to address the city’s remaining infrastructure deficit.

Ratepayers would traditionally vote on taking out such a large loan, but since construction of the water treatment plant wasn’t optional, the vote was limited to city council.

Councillors supporting the proposal cited the additional likelihood of rising interest rates if borrowing for the water treatment plant was deferred.

Construction contractors bidding on multi-year commitments to the projects would also be likelier to provide longer-term stability for local workers.

Council also took into consideration the increased costs of emergency repairs on sewer lines as compared to scheduled replacement.

“The cost of the repair scenario includes the extremely costly repairs associated with critical failures in the dead of winter,” said Heyck.

“While sewer capacity was adequate, the corrugated lines have continued to decay.”

While some of the accumulated money will be committed to road and sidewalk improvements, about $9 million will be devoted to accelerating the city’s sewer pipe replacement program.

The program, designed to replace corrugated metal lines with ductile iron, began in the 1980s and was scheduled to conclude in 2005, but the work had slowed considerably in recent years.

Sewer lines were already inspected and assessed, with corrugated lines most likely to fail first placed on the top of the list.

Under the accelerated plan, the entire program is scheduled to be completed by 2017, instead of the former estimate of 2023.

“While our watermains are in better shape than the sewer lines, they will also be replaced just to take advantage of the excavations we’ll be undertaking,” said Heyck.

All of the work will be dig-and-replace, with currently budgeted infrastructure work continuing as planned.

Significant additional work is likely to commence next summer.

“By dealing with the infrastructure deficit at an aggressive pace, and completing 10 years worth of work in five years, we’re hoping to be better off financially than if we deferred it,” said Heyck.

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