The City of North Battleford is bringing in a new flat fee for UPAR underground replacement for the private portion of sewer and water lateral pipes.
The plan is to bring in a flat fee of $1,000. According to Bob Anthony, the City’s in-house engineer, the flat fee would be for single family homeowners who wish to replace the privately owned portion of their pipes and water line while a UPAR project is being constructed on their block.
Typically, in the past each individual home would be assessed by the City and the cost would vary among each of them. The typical range would be between $800 and $1,500 for the privately-owned portion.
The $1,000 flat fee would be slightly less than what the average cost was last year, which was around $1,200.
The reason administration is proposing the flat fee is to “simplify things for property owners,” Anthony told council.
Under the old way of doing things, the first thing property owners wanted to know was how much a project was going to cost.
“Based on the way we’ve been doing it, it’s very difficult to say with certainty what it’s going to cost,” Anthony said.
The feedback from property owners on UPAR blocks was they would like to have certainty early on. Anthony believes the proposed flat fee would address that by providing that information up front.
According to Anthony the flat fee is being proposed for replacement of pipes from the front property line to the front of the house. It would include such things as supply of materials, labour and equipment to excavate, remove the existing pipes, install new pipes and backfill the excavations using an open trench method.
Council agreed with the recommendation to implement the flat fee and passed the resolution to that effect, unanimously.
