Sewage plant project split into phases

Faced with a $2.5 million funding shortfall on its sewage treatment plant project, Iqaluit city council’s engineering and planning committee is recommending the city build it in phases, rather than all at once.

The planning committee, which sits as a committee of the whole council, made the recommendation after listening to a proposal made by Brad Sokach, the city’s director of engineering.

The project is aimed at replacing the botched treatment plant that was to start operating in 1999, but never did.

The budget for the job, contained within the five-year capital plan that’s funded jointly by the city and the Government of Nunavut, stands at $6 million.

But its projected cost — $7.8 million for construction, and $700,000 for design work done by consultants — now adds up to $8.5 million.

Sokach explained that the cost increase is due to new, more stringent standards for the discharge of effluent that the federal and territorial governments are soon likely to adopt. The federal government is also adopting new regulations aimed at reducing the amount of ammonia within effluent.

All that means the city must now build much bigger treatment tanks within the facility, Sokach said. But the money to pay for it isn’t available from the GN or any other source.

So to satisfy regulators, especially the Nunavut Water Board, Sokach recommends the city split the project into phases.

The first phase, a “primary treatment” section, at a cost of only $3 million, could start going forward this year, Sokach said.

“It will not be difficult to add the secondary and tertiary treatment stages at a later date once funding has been confirmed,” he told the committee.

Construction of the primary section would produce effluent that is roughly equivalent to Nunavut standards, and would “show the regulators that something is happening,” Sokach said.

The committee agreed to accept Sokach’s idea, and will forward their recommendation to council.

If council says yes to the plan, then the city would issue a tender call for the job, and construction could begin this summer.