The Town of Lake Cowichan has found the money in its budget to cover the cost of the building contractor for the new Renfrew Town Square.
Recently, a bid of over $430,000 came forward from APEX as the contractor, which the Town decided to accept, despite the fact it had only budgeted just over $356,000 to cover the cost.
However, the town also received two other bids but the one from APEX was the lowest by a long way.
“We have fine tuned our operations budget,” said chief administrator Joe Fernandez at the regular council meeting last Tuesday.
“We have pulled money from the road construction budget, as well as the parks budget, that we didn’t have plans for yet. The town’s budget still remains the same.”
Mayor Ross Forrest confirmed the money being moved around would not have been used until 2015 anyway.
Council will run a balanced budget in 2014 but only after pulling over $360,000 out of its savings due to high costs of capital projects such as the town square.
A tax increase of three per cent still remains.
“We have a $127,000 grant on the table from Island Coastal Economic Trust for the town square,” said Forrest.
“By putting that off just to save money this year, we would then lose that grant. We can obviously move money around. We decided that the revitalization project should be completed this year.
“There are lots of projects that need to get done, but we can’t do them all.”
Coun. Bob Day was on the same page.
“Five to seven of us sit around the table to figure out the best budget for everyone and staff spend hundreds of hours getting it done,” said Day at the meeting.
“There’s about $50 million worth of projects that I believe need to be done in this community, but we can’t go to the taxpayer for everything. I can assure you that due diligence does take place.
“About 90 per cent of our streets, sidewalks, water and sewer needs to be done. We’ve decided to start at the core and we see that as moving forward. We can only fix things up to the sidewalks before houses, then the landowners have to come in. It is sad that we’ve had to move money around.”
Forrest categorically believes the town is moving forward as a whole.
“We do want to see as much done as possible. We did prioritize the downtown as we have to change the mood in this town. We talk to investors from time to time and they would much rather invest in a town that is on the up. We are trying our best.
“Also, if we don’t spend the $30,000 specifically allocated to Centennial Park this year, then that will go back in as a surplus for next year and will once again be strictly used for Centennial Park. It’s not a case of if we don’t spend it this year then we lose it.”
