Greenwood city council is seeking a government grant to replace the city’s aging reservoir, according to Mayor Barry Noll.
Council through a unanimous vote Monday, Feb. 14, authorized the Rossland engineering firm ISL to write the application on behalf of the city. The grant application will ask for around $2.9 million from the provincial and federal governments, according to council’s resolution.
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Total project costs are expected to come in somewhere between $4 million and $4.5 million, according to ISL’s Sean Annan and Noll.
Monday’s resolution calls on the city to pay for its roughly $1 million share through community gas tax reserves and some borrowing from the Municipal Finance Authority.
Greenwood’s Chief Administrative Officer Marcus Lebler said Thursday it was far too early to project the city’s borrowing costs, much less the terms of a potential loan.
The city, famous for having some of the best water in Canada, urgently needs a new reservoir — that much is clear.
“Our water reservoir is over 50 years old. We’ve had some problems with it and we’re running on borrowed time,” Noll said Thursday.
Lebler meanwhile said building a new reservoir was the city’s “single most pressing infrastructure need at the moment.”
The CAO said water quality hasn’t been affected and the current reservoir, located above the northeast section of Greenwood, is “functioning fine.”
But the reservoir is showing hairline cracks in its concrete exterior. These were identified by a 2018 inspection by the city’s public works department, which found shrubbery growing in the cracks. Crews took out the vegetation, but roots were found to have infested the reservoir.
The reservoir was built in the early 1960s and holds around 600 cubic metres of water, according to Annan. Greenwood’s water is supplied by an underground aquifer, which accounts for its clean, crisp taste.
The city would move to decommission and fill-in the current reservoir after the new one comes online, Annan said.
Council has not yet committed any funds to the project, nor has it approved any construction loans.
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