A major trunk renewal project originally slated to begin last year will go ahead in 2023 but with a much-reduced scope. On Tuesday night, Tantramar council approved hiring Dexter Construction to replace part of an old trunk sewer pipe that starts at the Weldon Street end of the Waterfowl Park Trans-Canada Trail.

The town of Sackville decided to delay the project last fall after the lowest bid on the tender came in $250,000 over the approved amount in Sackville’s capital utility budget. “We realized we needed to increase the budget,” says town engineer Jon Eppell, “so that’s what’s been done.”

But the town fared only slightly better this spring, when just one company decided to bid on the project. That bid was still over budget by about $142,000.

“Prices went up significantly versus last year,” says Eppell, “and unfortunately, this is where we find ourselves. We had to take the scope that we’d hoped to do this year, and scale it back.”

Instead of replacing a planned 115 metres of trunk sewer pipe this year, Dexter Construction will replace about half that. But the project won’t cost half as much. Dexter’s original bid for 115 metres of replacement pipe was about $648,000. Scaling back to just 57 metres of pipe shaved just $150,000 off the project cost, bringing the total to about $498,000. That’s because the first section of the pipe is the most expensive to do, says Eppell.

“The real costly part of this project is handling the significant sewage flow that is coming across on the south side of the waterfall park, to the trail, and then out to Weldon Street and Bridge Street and down Lorne,” explains Eppell. “This project allows us to handle that sewage while we’re replacing the sanitary sewer, and it is the bypassing of that sanitary sewage that is so costly.”

Because you can’t stop the flow of sewage long enough to replace a sewer, the operation becomes incredibly costly. And the more sewage, the more costly. Luckily, Eppell expects future phases of the project to cost less per metre of pipe replaced.

“So once we get past that point, we’re now dealing with much lower sanitary sewage flows,” says Eppell. “And the cost to handle sanitary sewage flows in subsequent phases of the project will be less.”

Eventually, about 550 metres of trunk sewer starting at Weldon Street and extending along the TransCanada Trail and underneath neighbouring properties, will have to be replaced.

Overall location of the project, from Sackville.com

Last summer the town approached residents to arrange easement on the properties to allow for the work. The pipes are old enough to predate the practice of getting easements, though Eppell is not sure exactly how old.

“It is quite old, and it is starting to fail on us,” says Eppell. “And so we want to get in there and replace it in the next few years. All of it, not just this section. That’s our game plan. It’s just a matter of what we can manage to get in the way of budget to do this without sacrificing all the other things that we want to do.”

The roughly $498,000 for the project comes out of the Sackville utility capital budget, paid for by Sackville water utility ratepayers.