City council has approved $400,000 that will be directed towards designing offsite sanitary sewer services for Shadow Mountain, a budget increase that was necessary following some challenges identified in the initial planning stages.
An initial proposal from a consultant projected a $274,000 cost for a minimal design, which would serve as a blueprint for connecting municipal sanitary sewer services with neighbourhoods out in the Shadow Mountain area.
However, that initial design didn’t include some geographic areas, and terrain elevation also factored in as an additional engineering challenge throughout that preliminary planning process.
The increase in funding will open up the scope of the design plan to include as much of the Shadow Mountain properties as possible, including properties in between the development and the city’s industrial edge.
“It will give us an idea of what’s needed in the long run, for everybody to connect, and hopefully we can design this system to connect to everybody, if possible,” Curtis Penson, the city engineer, told council.
Currently, the Shadow Mountain residential areas have two holding tanks that wastewater, which are emptied through a trucking and hauling to the city’s wastewater treatment system.
The city’s closest sanitary sewer main is located at Mennie Rd., roughly two kilometres away from the boundary of the Shadow Mountain development.
The funding is being directed from development securities and will not affect the tax levy or reserve funds, according to the city.