Rhino Ramblings - The Chokepoint
By Robert Thomas - Opinion/Commentary
For those who are Council followers this past council meeting has to be one of the greatest impacts for the City that nobody cares about.
It has nothing to do with the lack of funds to simply patch, let alone pave roads, but rather the Achilles’ heel that is now looming as a breaking point in our local core infrastructure.
The breaking point is in ordinary layperson’s term the rising costs of safely pumping poo or rather, I should say the replacement of the last pumping station - the Crescent View Lift Station.
The crescent view lift station - MJ Independent photo
There is no workaround here.
If this lift station goes down the entire water and sewer system fails almost immediately.
There is no major reservoir to store sewage water and poo.
It cannot be simply stored and trucked away as the entire system would almost immediately back up.
There is no capacity to truck it away. There is no workaround. The system fails it’s as easy as that.
On top of that the City needs the added capacity in its economic development plan to get rid of waste water from the new sow processing plant being developed for instance.
If worse comes to worse there is a legal basis to limit, cut off or just plain refuse water and sewer service to the plant until the Crescent View Lift Station is replaced.
It all sounds like an easy fix.
Why doesn’t the city just fix it?
The problem is the lack of money.
The High Service Pump House - MJ Independent photo
Spiralling Out Of Control Costs
So what is this all going to cost?
Well to put it bluntly and honestly nobody really knows.
The initial cost to replace the rapidly ageing Crescent View Lift Station was estimated at $26.6 million in November 2022.
Council approved the issuing of tenders using funding over three years to pay for the project.
Then they got the bad news - the costs Engineering had provided were way out of whack.
Funding from the Federal government was resoundingly rejected.
We, as a City, had already received funding elsewhere from the program for such things as the Moose Jaw Municipal Airport. It’s something we all agreed upon knowing it wouldn’t impact other grant applications.
But I digress.
Needless to say inflation and world events have taken ahold of the Crescent View Lift Station.
Parts, piping and components are in a never ending spiral of cost increases as resources are in high demand elsewhere.
The previously $26.6 million had now ballooned to a whopping $66.4 million or about a 150 percent increase in just eight months.
And on top of this NO senior government assistance.
The outdoor pool - MJ Independent photo
So the call went out to apply for federal funding under a different grant and all will be well.
Additional funding for design was approved and all is well.
We have placed this necessary core infrastructure project in a planning holding pattern flying around City Hall right up there with the repairs to the Fourth Avenue Bridge, major water feeder lines and other core needs.
I just wonder are we really fixing City Hall’s clock or is the City really just upgrading the Unfunded Project Traffic Control Tower up there?
It leads to so many questions being asked.
Realistically speaking what are the odds of not receiving this grant? Then what? How much are taxes going to have to increase to pay for it?
What happens if the City does not receive funding for the lift station, but rather receives funding for let’s just say for argument, a new outdoor pool?
Does the City proceed with a pool knowing full well that they cannot afford to pay for the necessary new Crescent Point Lift Station?
Or do they do the responsible thing?
Does Council say no and choose Needs over Wants?
It’s a quandary the City may very well face.
We will finally get the money for the outdoor pool - a facility where the leak has been fixed - but at the same time what we really need is a not so glamorous sewage lift station.
The often maligned section of 13th Avenue NW is now a patchwork of continuing repair - MJ Independent photo
It’s something Councillor Dawn Luhning eluded to when it came to the speech about the City cannot be everything to everybody and as such needs to just say no if we want to have good roads versus some of the crumbling ones now out there.
It’s a seemingly very tough road for Council to take.
Remember this is a Council that approved additional funding in the hundreds of thousands of dollars seemingly meeting after meeting.
Additional funding including such things as taking the Moose Jaw Events Centre catering in-house one meeting and then the next meeting to loan them $150,000 only to in the end call it part of the subsidy.
I don’t think Council wants me to publish what many restaurant owners told me off the record about this one.
From many in the community I was personally told this all reeks of bad management.
The frills need to go and use the money to fix the roads.
To put it simply what Councillor Luhning was stating is that when the same inevitable group of people show up once again for City funding - whether it be in-camera, behind closed doors or even in public council they need to be hastily given a PFO letter.
And above all don’t give them a single kopeck.
My guess is Council doesn’t have it in them. It’s just another pothole or two to put up with.
I wonder how this Council would respond to let’s say the situation Saskatoon is in with a $75 million operating deficit looming over that municipality in the next two years.
How would our Council respond to a seven percent across the board cut that the Greater Saskatoon Chamber of Commerce is now calling for?
The sad thing is the ability to say no is what this City needs right now to get our core services back in some state of repair. But something that’s sadly lacking.
Robert Thomas is acting editor of MJ Independent.
He is on a more or less on hiatus working on a project for a much larger media organization.