City greenlights $139M water upgrade

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This article was published 31/07/2025 (238 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The City of Brandon awarded the single largest construction contract in its history Monday as council voted to go forward with a $139-million project to improve drinking water quality.

The cost will be split between the city, the province and the federal government.

Brandon City Council awarded the contract worth $127,871,394.77 to NAC Constructors Ltd. for a new membrane building, which will be part of the city’s water treatment facility on 26th Street North.

Alexia Stangherlin, the city’s director of utilities, said the city isn’t meeting requirements during the summer months for clean water. The current system the city uses has largely been unchanged since the 1940s.

“This city’s operating licence — we’ve been in a state of non-compliance for a few years now, primarily based on disinfection byproduct,” Stangherlin told council.

After the upgrades are completed, the city’s water is expected to exceed provincial operating-licence requirements.

Work is slated to start this year and be completed in June 2029, Stangherlin said.

The city is putting in $29,370,000 for the project through loans, while the province is contributing $46,630,000 and Ottawa’s share is $44 million, for a total of $120 million.

An additional $19 million will come from the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program and a debenture taken out by the city, according to a council report. In total, once other work is completed, the membrane project is estimated to cost up to $139 million.

The city borrowed $40,670,500 for work on the entire water treatment facility project in 2022. That includes work not being done on the membrane building. In 2023, council moved to borrow an additional $15 million at a 7.5 per cent interest rate, which was finally approved at the July 7 meeting.

The cost of the upgrades for the entire water treatment facility is $155 million, up from $153 million announced at a council meeting in March 2024.

Stangherlin said the old system doesn’t do as good a job as it should, per the regulations.

“It just does not remove those constituents in the water to the degree that we need them to.”

This isn’t a new requirement for cities, she said, but Brandon didn’t previously have the money necessary for the upgrade.

The new “dual membrane system with ultra filtration and nano filtration that will blend with the current water” won’t replace the 1940s system, but will be in support of much of what is already there, Stangherlin said.

While not doing a full replacement isn’t a very common way of doing upgrades yet, it is becoming more common as local governments try to save money, she said, adding the City of Portage la Prairie is doing a similar project.

Coun. Greg Hildebrand (Ward 5) said he’s thankful that this is what is happening, instead of a complete overhaul.

“It’s good that we’re being cost-effective and choosing value as we move through,” Hildebrand said.

Coun. Shaun Cameron (Ward 4) said the project is necessary, even though it might not make for a glamorous announcement.

“It’s not something that’s overly jazzy as far as a headline, but it is integral work that we’re doing as a city to better prepare ourselves for the future but also to continue to create that safe drinking water for residents,” Cameron said.

“It’s a big sticker shock — or a big dollar-value item. But I think there’s really no more important work we can do than what we’re doing here.”

Mayor Jeff Fawcett said the project is big news.

“For some of us, it is kind of a jazzy headline. It is important and it is the basis of what we do,” Fawcett said.

“It’s been a long time coming.”

In a follow-up interview on Thursday, Fawcett went even further.

“It’s the single largest construction contract in the city’s (history),” he told the Sun.

He said it’s important for this to happen, as the city’s water quality after the upgrades will “meet and exceed standards” currently in place in Canada.

“In Canada, we have some of the highest standards in the world. We have probably better water than 90 per cent of the population across the globe, probably more than that.”

Fawcett added that even though the water isn’t meeting the regulations at some points during the summer, it is still safe to drink.

He said it’s important for the city to make these investments for the future, as past councils did in the 1940s and 1960s.

“We’re making those kind of investments so that we do have long-term drinking water standards that are exceeded now, and so that we should be able to go well into the future with this,” Fawcett said.

The city awarded the contract to NAC Constructors Ltd., even though it came in with the highest of two bids. Stangherlin said that’s because the bid from Penn-co Construction didn’t meet all the tender specifications.

According to the purchasing and tenders page from the city, NAC’s bid was for $134,264,964.51, just over $2 million more than Penn-co’s. The bid was higher than what was awarded because the city doesn’t have to pay the GST.

» alambert@brandonsun.com