With Landfill cell completion, Mayor Brain declares that Demolition Days are coming

The Old Empress Structure may be but another Prince Rupert
memory come 2022, as the city announces completion of the
landfill site and a green light for extensive demolition work
around the city to now follow

The days of downtown eyesores may soon be behind us, with Prince Rupert Mayor Lee Brain noting this week that 2022 may be the year of downtown demolition work.

In the latest of what has been seven days of civic celebratory social media missives for his followers on Facebook, a few of them recycled themes from past announcements, Mayor Brain  delivered news of the completion of the new landfill cell at the Ridley Island Access Road Landfill site.   

The delayed opening for the project which moved up on the council agenda timeline in June of 2019,  had resulted in a lack of demolition in the city proper, leaving a number of derelict and no longer in use structures standing, that owing to a lack of space to remove the debris to the civic landfill.

In his message of Tuesday, Mr. Brain also notes that close to 24 properties described as unsightly have been brought into compliance through the City's enforcement campaign of letters to property owners, that initiative introduced in January of 2021 and serving to bring about a bit of a clean up to the city.

Work on the landfill site made for some of the spending recently approved as part of the City's Capital Spending Presentation of December 17th, that update on the work at the Ridley Island site noted of the costs towards closing one cell and opening the new one. 

City Council's financial allocation towards that work will see the land fill cell closure cost of 2.6 Million dollars taken out of Dividend /Accrual accounts. While the new cell will see 1.4 million dollars taken from Reserves or surplus with 200,000 dollars taken from Dividends/Accruals

In a November presentation to Council, the City's Director of Operations Richard Pucci provided a thumbnail sketch of the progress towards completion at the Ridley Island landfill, noting at the time it was near 95% complete with weather making for delays to the final commissioning phase.

In June the Operations Director had provided Council with an update on the delays for the project which as he explained at the time were related to COVID and an impact on procurement.

"The operations department recognizes that the ongoing pandemic related disruptions in the supply chain, is really now focused on these long lead items. So we're looking at sourcing this material actually out of Dubai. The material, the cost of the material fluctuates daily and basically we are having challenges having the suppliers hold the prices that will allow us two weeks to come forward and get council approval. The value of this, for these products is going to be around two million dollars, but this is all included within the Capital project for the landfill expansion. So what the request is, is that Council allow us to move forward to purchase these long lead items, get them on a ship over here so that we can have them installed in time for opening the landfill cell and then what I will do is report on the total cost of these items at a later date, once we've secured them and had them shipped over"

Mr. Pucci's June comments were a follow up to his report for Council of May that relayed further background on the sourcing issues.

Some of the history on the work on the landfill site and the stops and starts can be explored through our Major Project archive page here.

More notes on the year of work from Council can be reviewed through our Council Discussion page.

Cross posted from the North Coast Review.