A woman from the Sandy Bay area is protesting SaskPower’s lack of consultation on a local project that will be worth $45 million once complete.
On Wednesday afternoon, Michelle McDonald said she planned to stand outside a SaskPower open house that had been scheduled to discuss a different topic.
Her protest came about after she found out about a SaskPower contract for the lead engineers on a massive hydroelectric project.
“I was just looking at it, I see it just by chance online,” she said of a contract awarded to Montreal-based SNC-Lavalin, which will head engineering work for concrete upgrades at the Island Falls powerhouse.
The project’s total capital cost over the next four and a half years is $45 million.
Speaking of several contracts in the Sandy Bay area that went up on Tuesday, McDonald said she has issues with SaskPower stating it’s committed to “building a strong relationship with the community” of Sandy Bay.
“We’ve never been consulted about them (the contracts). They’ve had two community open houses in the past six months – the issue was safety,” McDonald said.
The Island Falls Hydroelectric Power Station is more than 85 years old, and SaskPower spokesman Jonathan Tremblay says the $45 million price tag for maintenance work is standard with structures this big, and this old.
When asked if there was any consultation done with area residents, he said “no, not as far as I know. We don’t hold open house sessions on maintenance work inside our buildings.”
The selection process for the recently-awarded contract came after SaskPower issued a public request for proposals (RFP), which is a public process.
“It’s fairly routine, we put up these RFPs very often. It’s not routine that people complain that we haven’t included them because it’s a fully public system, it’s a fully public RFP process so there’s no backroom deals here, it all has to be public,” Tremblay said.
Tremblay says SNC-Lavalin’s scope so far is only for 10 per cent of the overall project. Actual construction work won’t start until 2016, and will undergo the same RFP selection process, Tremblay said.
Because of that, he says there will be no consultation meetings on the project.