Winkler city council passed a resolution at its Feb. 27 meeting that paves the way for the planned expansion of the community’s water treatment plant to get underway this year.
The numbers are in and it looks like the project will come with a price tag of approximately $14.6 million. Council’s resolution allows the Manitoba Water Services Board (MWSB) to now select the winning tender from those received.
Mayor Henry Siemens says the province has committed to providing about $5 million for the work, leaving Winkler on the hook for $9.6 million. But council has asked MWSB for some top-up funding, and Siemens is optimistic we’ll get it.
“We have asked for an additional $1.15 million. That request has gone to the treasury board and we’re hoping that literally within days we’ll hear about that.”
If Winkler’s bid for more provincial dollars is successful, the project will cost taxpayers $8.45 million.
Either way, it’s right in line with what the city hoped to spend, and bodes well for the fate of the Winkler Centennial Arena renovation project, which is in a holding pattern until the cost of both the water treatment plant expansion and the wastewater treatment facility build are confirmed. The latter project (expected to cost somewhere in the $50 million range) went to tender last month; it will be a few weeks before those numbers come in.
Winker’s water treatment plant, located in the north part of the city, opened in 2012. Siemens says it was built with this future expansion in mind, and now’s the time for it as the city continues to grow in leaps and bounds.
The facility currently treats up to 42 litres of water a second using a reverse osmosis system. Once the expansion is done, it will be able to treat up to 113 litres per second.
“We will also create some additional efficiencies that will allow us to treat more of that brackish water and have less reject water,” Siemens says.
“Currently our water treatment plant is running at about 70 per cent efficiency,” he says, explaining that number represents the amount of drinkable water they can extract from the brackish water in the aquifer. “The upgrade and expansion will bring us to 90-95 per cent.”
Less reject water means less of a strain on the wastewater treatment system, Siemens notes, creating more capacity there as well.
Winkler currently gets its water mainly from the aquifer but also from Pembina Valley Water Co-op.
“Winkler takes the exact same amount of water from the Pembina Valley Water Coop today as we did 10 years ago,” Siemens notes. “This expansion allows us to be able to move forward to a population of about 25,000 people before we’ll need any more water from Pembina Valley Water Co-op.”
Winkler currently has just over 15,000 residents.
