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Osoyoos weighing options on leaky, creaky town hall

The town is paying over $30,000 for a structural assessment on the aging building
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With a leaky roof and the fire hall no longer housed in the building, officials at Osoyoos Town Hall area looking at whether they should repair or replace the building. (Google Street View)

Osoyoos Town Hall will be getting a nearly $34,000 structural assessment to help the township decide whether to replace or repair the building.

“The floors are creaky, we’re not quite sure how to deal with town hall, whether it is worth putting some money into and fixing it up or is it going to cost us too much,” Mayor Sue McKortoff said.

“It’s been on our agenda for a while, but particularly at the very front where we have to put out garbage cans when it rains inside the building.”

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McKortoff couldn’t give an estimated life expectancy of the aging building, largely because it has been added onto and modified over the years, but said there may be some looming safety issues.

“That’s partly why we’re doing this. We want to know all that information before we put any money into it,” she said.

The town put out a request for proposals, with the fire department no longer housed in the building and town staff having to contend with a leaky roof, and received seven proposals listed on the council agenda for Monday.

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Those proposals ranged from $6,400 up to nearly $75,000, with the staff-recommended David Nairne Associates, with an estimate of $31,378.

“The main difference in the proposals was the staffing approach that was going to be used to implement the project,” the staff report reads. “The lower costing proposal were to employ the use of building assessment technologists and the mid-range and upper costing projects were using a team of engineers and architects for their onsite assessment.”

McKortoff said the $30,000 price tag was right around what the town had set aside for the assessment, which was part of why council sided with that proposal.

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“So we were within budget for sure, or very close to it, and we felt that that was the best that we could do with that money.”

The David Nairne Associates quote also came with talks of a roof assessment for an additional $2,300, which McKortoff called “essential” to the project.

Though numerous municipalities are facing increasing infrastructure costs following decades of underfunding — including Penticton, which is facing up to its infrastructure deficit — McKortoff acknowledged the garbage bin raincatchers may be a more dire situation than other cities and towns.

“We can’t just patch the roof, and we’ve had a few people look at it, and they say ‘this looks a bit more like we need to get in there and really figure out what’s gone on,’” McKortoff said.

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McKortoff acknowledged whatever project council decides on would likely be an expensive one for the town, adding the town may need to borrow money, but she said the town does not have an estimated budget for the project.

“We don’t know whether we have to tearing the building down and start from scratch — that would be the worst case scenario,” McKortoff said.

“But we are not going to put any money in repairs in the building until we know what we’re dealing with, and we don’t yet.”


@dustinrgodfrey
dustin.godfrey@pentictonwesternnews.com
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