BREAKING: City can only afford to fix 3 blocks of Queen Street this year

City councillors are in for some major sticker shock on Monday as they meet to approve the start of this year's improvements on downtown Queen Street.

Bids came in way higher than expected and council will be asked to award a $6.2-million contract to Avery Construction Ltd. to rebuild only the three blocks of Queen Street East from Brock to Elgin.

When city council first approved the project on Aug. 28 of last year, it was hoping everything from Pim Street to Bruce (1,200 metres) could be resurfaced for no more than $6 million.

If the lowest bid exceeded that amount, council directed that the geographic size of the project be shrunk to fit the budget.

As SooToday exclusively reported last month, the 700 and 800 blocks of Queen Street East, from Pim to East Street, were quietly removed from the project when bid documents were released to contractors.

That reduced the job to 870 metres of Queen between East and Bruce.

Tonight, there's word of more shrinkage.

It turns out only two companies bid on the job: Avery Construction and Pioneer Construction Inc.

Avery was low bidder at $9 million – considerably more than the $6-million cap set by city councillors.

"To meet the $6-million budget requirement, the project limits are recommended to be from Elgin Street to Brock Street," Maggie McAuley, municipal services and design engineer, says in a report prepared for Monday's council meeting.

That's just three blocks of Queen Street, about 40 per cent of the 1,200 metres city officials originally hoped to resurface this year.

So the contract set for council approval on Monday will be for Queen Street from Brock to Elgin.

And the $6.2-million price tag is still a couple hundred thousand dollars more than the $6-million limit imposed by council.

But McAuley has found a way around that.

As SooToday exclusively reported earlier this month, city officials recently learned that when the last major work on Queen was done 40 years ago, a century-old stretch of sewer pipe on the March Street to Elgin block wasn't replaced, for reasons no one's able to explain.

That means the most complex and potentially disruptive part of this year’s reconstruction work will be on that block's sanitary sewers.

So on Monday, McAuley will argue that the $214,489 overrun be charged to sanitary sewer accounts, skirting council's $6-million limit on this year's work.

To complicate things further, there's a wild card in the city's Queen Street reconstruction deck.

The city has applied to Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corp. (NOHFC) for a $2-million grant to support the streetscaping portion of the Queen Street improvement project.

So far, there's no word that application has been successful, and with the construction season about to begin, the contract with Avery has been drafted as if the NOHFC funding won't be available.

"If the NOHFC funding application is successful, the limits can be adjusted to include from Elgin Street to East Street," McAuley says.

The Queen Street job is described as "supplying all materials, labour and equipment necessary to compete upgrades of... Queen Street including removals, grading, granular base, asphalt, concrete curb and sidewalk, unit pavers, streetscape amenities, street lighting, traffic signals and various upgrades to the storm sewers, sanitary sewers and watermains along with related appurtenances."

This year's construction was originally part of a much larger $18-millon rebuilding of Queen Street that met resistance from some city councillors.

But Mayor Shoemaker horse-traded a compromise motion under which the job was to be completed in up to three separate sections, with a pause of at least two years between sections.

Councillors will also be asked on Monday to allow the temporary closing of Queen Street between East and Brock, including intersections, from May 1 to Nov. 30, 2024 to facilitate the downtown improvements.

Monday's city council meeting will be live-streamed on SooToday starting at 5 p.m.