The Sunshine Coast Regional District has awarded a contract worth $503,490 for some of the preliminary work on the Chapman Lake water supply expansion project.
The engineering firm AECOM won the bid, and will handle the design, regulatory approvals, and construction management.
SCRD chair Garry Nohr signed the final agreement Feb. 9.
The contract price tag does not include any of the actual construction work.
Nohr said finding money for the construction phase will be part of the 2016 budget deliberations, which got underway this week. He said the final numbers will depend on what AECOM comes back with for the design, but the SCRD is expecting an additional $500,000.
“The plan is to be doing it in July, so we’ll see where that goes,” he said.
The project follows last summer’s extreme drought on the Sunshine Coast. The SCRD was forced to go to its highest water use restrictions because levels on Chapman Lake nearly dropped below the channel that feeds the regional water system.
Lowering that channel to allow five metres of additional drawdown from the lake could provide an extra one million cubic metres of water for the SCRD system, firefighting needs, and a so-called “environmental flow” into Chapman Creek.
Plans to increase the drawdown were put on hold in the fall of 2014 after opposition from groups like the Sunshine Coast Conservation Association and the Tetrahedron Alliance, but the 2015 drought gave the plan fresh urgency.
