The days of boil water advisories and taps running dry for residents along Solsqua-Sicamous Road are coming to an end.
District of Sicamous council has awarded the construction of a waterline to KLL Construction. Their winning bid, totalling $318,420, was the only one of six received by the district to come in under the $365,000 project budget.
The project will connect Solsqua-Sicamous Road properties to the district’s water treatment plant.
Operations manager Joe McCulloch said he and Coun. Jeff Mallmes had been working steadily behind the scenes on the project, that Interior Health supports it and that he is looking forward to getting it started as quickly as possible.
For Marie-Paule Lacasse and fellow Solsqua-Sicamous Road residents, the project’s approval was music to the ears.
“(On behalf of) the residents who live on Solsqua-Sicamous Road within the city boundaries, a special thank you to Mr. (Evan) Parliament (town manager) for insuring this fundamental project was not to continue being postponed,” Lacasse told council. “Thank you to the mayor and all the councillors who supported it unanimously, and Joe McCulloch got onto the project in record time and took the time to keep us in touch with the complications of the project, the logistics of it and keep us to date and it’s quite obvious that he is a doggone good negotiator. Thank you, thank you!”
Mayor Terry Rysz also thanked Mallmes for his work, noting the project was a long time coming.
“That conversation was happening when I was on council prior to becoming the mayor, and then it became a concern since this council has been in power,” Rysz told the News. “So now we’re going into our fourth year and we’re finally getting it done.
“It was complicated too in how we were going to route it and, of course, how we were going to finance it and so forth. We’re hoping that somewhere down the line, all of these kind of remote jurisdictions within the community are going to be assisted by getting them all onto town water. We’ve got this beautiful, well-operating water treatment plant so that’s been kind of our mandate all along, to get water to that jurisdiction for sure.”
@SalmonArm
lachlan@saobserver.net
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter