Dryden city council approves two tenders

Despite higher than expected tenders, Dryden City council will be going ahead with a couple of capital projects.

That includes $7.9 million for the Duke Street project. That’s 51.1 percent higher than initially projected.

Roger Nesbitt is CAO of the city and says there are a number of reasons for the increased costs of the projects, and all municipalities are facing the same situation.

“This has been a trend…not a fantastic trend, I’ll agree to that,” Nesbitt told council at Monday night’s open meeting.

“But we don’t necessarily use the same engineering services for each of the larger projects. Each project would go out for RFP or tender for engineering services.”

Councillor Bryan Tardiff has called into question the prices determined by their engineers and says they seem to have been wrong for years.

But Nesbitt says they can’t blame the engineers for the cost of projects being higher than expected.

“This trend has developed over the past couple of years, really regardless of which engineering service we’ve been using. So, it’s not a single, specific engineering firm that we use for every project for putting together our tender documents and estimation purposes.”

The South Van Horne Housing Enabling Project will take place in two stages, with the first taking place this year and the second next year.

That project will include $4.8 million of work this year, and $3.6 million next year. That’s 23.7 percent higher than the original budget.

Duke Street Project will have the $2.8 million shortfall covered by the work not being done on South Van Horne Project this year.