Following council motion, the City of Lloydminster has moved 59 projects forward into 2026.
Council resolution is required to complete the operating and capital work in 2026 from the prior year
Read more: Stubbs challenges Liberals on projects, grocery prices
“The majority of City projects are budgeted and completed on an annual basis,” said Ryan Hill, financial planning and analysis manager at the Feb. 2 regular council meeting. “However, there are instances where projects need more than one year to be completed.”
Of the total 59 projects being brought to 2026, 22 of them have seen external delays.
“External delay means the contractor or the person we hired, or something is external to the city is holding up the project,” Hill said of the $15.7 million in delayed projects.
Some of the projects are designed to run for multiple years, with 12 multi-year projects being carried forward.
“Sometimes projects start in November and they’re going to end in February and they’re just a victim of our year-end being Dec. 31,” he said.
Of the remaining projects, nine have had their scope changed, 10 are underresourced and four have supply chain issues.
“We saw that (supply chain issues) a lot more in the past with COVID when things were really backing up,” said Hill. “If you look, $400,000 now it was a lot bigger in 2022/23. So, we’re seeing that kind of clear.”
During discussions, council received an update on its T-Rex aerial unit.
“We do have it back in hall one already,” said Don Stang, executive manager of operations. “The reason that’s a carryforward is because the invoice didn’t get issued until just recently, I think within the last week. So it didn’t make the cutoff for 2025, so we need the funds in 2026 to pay the invoice and allocate it properly.”
The city says it works every year to bring down the list of projects that are carried forward.
“One of our goals is to get this list down as low as possible every year,” said Dion Pollard, city manager. “Our table is certainly trying to push to get these projects done but we also only have so many resources and time to do that.”
He also gave some further insight on how projects land on this list.
“Some of the underresourced has to do with we had vacancies in some of those departments, timing of that vacancy can be critical,” said Pollard. “If somebody leaves halfway through a project now somebody else has to pick that up in addition to what they’re doing while we’re trying to recruit that vacancy. I think that happened on a couple of them.
“I think the other thing that happened this year, a couple of teams, probably more than a couple, with the timeline of Cenovus Energy Hub opening we were full speed ahead on that to make sure it was open on time. Some of the teams had to put their internal department projects on the backburner to get to the finish line on that.”
Council approved the operating and capital carryforward projects to be added to the 2026 budget for a combined total of $35 million.
Read more: Black History Month honoured in Lloyd
