At Monday’s special meeting, Sackville town council heard about plans for two major purchases of back-up generators, one for the Tantramar Veterans Memorial Civic Centre and one for the town’s public works facility and lift stations. The recommended bids are coming in about $170,000 under budget between the two purchases.
A backup generator for the Civic Centre has been in the plans for several years, explained town engineer Dwayne Acton, with money budgeted for the capital purchase in both the 2019 and 2020 budgets.
The need was identified because the Civic Centre is the designated emergency measures reception centre and warming centre, says Acton.
“One of the things that we’ve been wrestling with for many years is the fact that our EMO reception centre and warming centre has no backup power,” Acton told council. “And after a few years of discussion, it was decided in 2019 that we need to proceed forward with a backup generator for this facility. Not only is it critical to an EMO situation or warming centre, but it’s critical in the event that we had a bad power outage at the Civic Centre during the wintertime,” said Action. “If the plant was shut down for an extended period of time, we would lose the ice. So that’s critical there as well.”
The town asked for bids on two options, one with higher capacity than the other. In the end, Acton is recommending going with the lowest bid in the higher capacity system, which is about $20,000 more than the low bid with the lower capacity system.
The total project will end up costing about $483,000, and the price is well below the original budgeted envelope of $634,000. That means just under $150,000 in previously budgeted capital funds will not need to be spent.
The project requires considerable lead time, and also the shut down of the compressors at the Civic Centre. For those reasons, Acton explained, the actual installation won’t happen until after ice season, in mid to late March.
Acton also had news on another back-up generator project, this time a portable generator to be available for the public works facility and ten lift stations that don’t currently have back up power systems.
Again, the recommended bid is coming in below the budgeted amount, this time about $20,000 under budget. A motion will come forward at next Monday’s meeting to spend just over $68,000 on the portable generator.
Council next meets on Monday, November 9th.
Links are available on the town website, here.
