The smell of money: CBRM sewage project comes in 26% under budget

A sewage treatment project in Sydney Harbour is coming in under budget and that has officials in Cape Breton Regional Municipality thinking about starting another one.

CBRM is just finishing a sewage treatment project on the west side of Sydney Harbour.

The estimated cost was $58 million, but it's coming in about $15 million under budget.

Public works director Wayne MacDonald said it's rare for a large infrastructure project to generate about 26 per cent in savings.

"Well, certainly not as many times as we would hope," he said.

The Sydney Harbour West project includes new sewage collector lines and a new treatment plant for waste from homes and businesses in Sydney River, Westmount, Coxheath and the Sydport industrial park.

Since the pandemic, construction projects have been hit with higher costs and labour shortages, but MacDonald said CBRM got lucky with the timing of the tenders on the latest project.

"We were at a very interesting time, just at the beginning of the pandemic late 2019, early 2020, before all of those effects really hit."

In addition, bids were competitive because contractors had not yet started work at massive reconstruction projects at area hospitals and the new Nova Scotia Community College campus in downtown Sydney, MacDonald said.

The municipality has already completed one large project cleaning up the east side of Sydney Harbour and has works underway in Glace Bay and Port Morien as it races to meet federal wastewater regulations.

A few years ago, CBRM started planning and getting cost estimates for a separate sewer treatment in New Victoria, further out in Sydney Harbour, so officials have begun talking with federal and provincial funding partners.

MacDonald said they seem positive about using the savings from the latest project to get the new one underway.

'In the ballpark'

"We upgraded those costs based on a bit of inflation to get us to a 2024 number and it's just shy of about $14 million, so we're in the ballpark, I believe," he said.

If the New Victoria project gets approved, MacDonald said it will go a long way towards improving the health of the harbour.

"It's another check mark for all of the raw water outfalls that we currently own and we're talking about 840,000 litres of raw sewer entering Sydney Harbour on a daily basis, so it's significant."

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