This summer's planned facelift at Sault Ste. Marie's landmark waterfront Civic Centre is going to cost more than expected.
A $6,895,000 bid from Cy Rheault Construction Ltd. of Timmins was the lowest of four sealed tenders opened Monday.
That's almost $400,000 more than the $6.5 million estimate cited when the makeover was approved by City Council in February, 2017.
In Sault Ste. Marie, Rheault has previously built Francis H. Clergue French Immersion Public School and Algoma University's biosciences and technology convergence centre.
Final awarding of the building contract still requires approval from City Council, which is not bound to accept the lowest tender, or any of the four bids.
Council considers replacement of the Civic Centre's exterior cladding and windows as necessary because of corrosion, seal failures and air and water barrier deficiencies.
The original brown-and-gold colours are no longer available, so councillors opted to change the colour of the 43-year-old municipal building to white.
Concord, Ontario-based Bondfield Construction Co. Ltd. – which previously built the Essar Centre, Algoma Public Health headquarters and Superior Heights Collegiate and Vocational School – submitted the second-lowest bid at $9,611,000.
George Stone and Sons Inc. of Sault Ste Marie offered to do the job for $9,796,000.
Sudbury's Nu-Style Construction Co. Ltd. bid $13,420,000.
The Civic Centre was built on land reclaimed from the St. Marys River at the site of the old ferry dock .
It was dedicated on Dec. 16, 1974 and opened for business on May 5, 1975.
The original cost of the building was $4.3 million, including the land and all furnishings.
This year's building project is subject to a collective agreement with the Labourers International Union of North America Local 1036 and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners Local 2486 stipulating that the city must use only local contractors who are in contractual relations with those unions for work in the industrial, commercial, and institutional sectors.
"The schedule is set up so that the contractor should be finished this year, sometime in the fall," Don Elliott, the city's director of engineering services, told SooToday on Monday.
City Council directed that white aluminum composite panels be used on the Civic Centre.
Considerable attention was paid by city staff to fire safety issues after 71 people died last year in a public housing tower fire in West London, England, involving exterior aluminum composite cladding installed one year earlier.
"The specified materials are going to be safe. They won't be combustible," Elliott told us late Monday afternoon.
Sault Mayor Christian Provenzano has emphasized that the Civic Centre renovations are needed for health and safety issues and are not being undertaken for aesthetic reasons.
"An asset review study that was done in 2014 recommended making the replacements as soon as possible, but no later than by 2018. It is a project that has to happen and we would be negligent to try and postpone it any longer," the mayor said early last year.
"We are going to use long-term debt to pay for the majority of the costs to replace the windows and cladding. To me, this is a prudent decision because the city carries exceptionally low debt and we are still in a very favourable environment for interest rates. Furthermore, an annual stream of funding has already been identified within the 2017 budget to finance the loan. This project is not increasing the budget or increasing your taxes."
