Nelson’s Hall Street project will be finished by the end of 2018, not by the end of this year as planned.
According to city manager Kevin Cormack, installing an upgraded storm sewer and other utilities means detailed discussions with other agencies and that is taking longer than expected.
“With the time it took to get permitting in place,” he told the Star, “coupled with the intricacies of the closing of high traffic intersections while trying to minimize the effect of such closures on the business community it became evident that the project would need to be split between the 2017 and 2018 year.”
Putting in a new storm sewer outfall and a shoreline park, along with running the sewer and other utilities under railway tracks and the highway will involve negotiations with the Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of Transportation and the CPR.
The new storm sewer has proved to be a more difficult engineering design project than expected, Cormack said. The storm sewer improvement is intended to combat the tendency for extreme flooding at the Hall and Front intersection during rainstorms.
By the end of 2017, starting just south of the Lakeside-Hall intersection (between the tracks and Lakeside Drive), sewer, water, paving, and park construction will be completed all the way to the lake, including a revamping of the Lakeside-Hall intersection. The section of Hall Street heading south of that point will wait for 2018.
Cedar Street will be extended to join with Lakeside Drive to take traffic pressure off lower Hall St. during construction.
The project will cost two per cent more than originally budgeted because some of the costs turned out to be ineligible for an expected grant. That two per cent, amounting to $165,000, will be covered by the city as a contingency in the event that it is needed in 2018.
The total budget for Phase Two (from Lake Street to the waterfront), is $6,827,000. Two-thirds of that, Cormack says, will be funded by an infrastructure grant from the federal government’s gas tax fund. The other third will be paid by the city out of its utility reserves that had been set aside for the upgrades of the sewer and water systems.
Related stories:
Nelson city hall reveals plans for lower Hall St. (December, 2016)
Nelson’s Hall St. phase two construction starts this summer (April 10, 2017)
Nelson’s Hall Street plan finalized (April 25, 2017)
