The City of Lloydminster is moving forward with a $4.6-million plan to overhaul the municipal landfill, with council giving first reading to a borrowing bylaw.
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Substantial changes are coming to the landfill under the new borrowing bylaw, which covers the cost of a new operations building, entrance and scalehouse.
“They’re looking at approaching it on the south side, (a) totally different entrance,” said Lloydminster Mayor Gerald Aalbers. “The buildings that we have there are not ideal, we can’t even store the equipment that we have. The heavy equipment that’s very expensive, we don’t have enough space to store it indoors.
“The discussion (includes) two scales — when you drive in on one side and drive out on the other.”
Ryan Hill, financial planning and analysis manager, City of Lloydminster, gave some insight into Lloyd’s current debt situation.
“The total debt outstanding for the city, at the end of Feb. 28, we had just over $89 million of debt outstanding, which is just over 48 per cent of our 2025 debt limit, which is sitting at $184 million,” he said, noting the amounts are unaudited and subject to change. “If this $4.6 million were to come out, it adds about 2.5 per cent to the outstanding debt limit and about 1.1 per cent to the debt servicing limit.”
Coun. Justin Vance asked if detailed designs could be completed before the city commits to borrowing the funds.
“If we can pay for the detailed design and then bring the borrowing bylaw back once council can see what we’re getting for that amount, just because it’s such a large amount,” he said.
Hill noted the majority of the project was being funded through borrowing.
“There wouldn’t be any funds available to do detailed design unless we added budget for that from reserve or somewhere else,” he said.
The item will return to council once the tender has been put out.
“The detailed designs will come out and then you will still have to award the tender of it,” said Hill. “There would still be the opportunity to say we don’t want to award and this bylaw would just be sitting there saying, when you do, or don’t want to award, then we can just go and borrow.”
Highlighting the need for a quick start, City manager Dion Pollard spoke to the importance of the timeline.
“I do think it’s important, because of the length of the process, to get it first then proceed through the process,” he said.
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