With the Pinty’s Grand Slam over, the Pictou County Wellness Centre can get to work on its sinking gymnasium. A subsidence, originating from a stream bed that the facility was built on top of is causing a section of the building by the gym to sink.
“Every building settles, but that one section right by the gym is settling a bit faster than the rest of the building,” facility COO Greg Smith told The News back in September 2019.
A third-party engineering firm called Stantec has been monitoring the issue and measuring the rate at which it is falling to the bottom of that stream bed. “It hasn’t moved significantly in the last six months,” said Smith in a recent interview. “But obviously we don’t want to leave it.”
An RFP has recently been issued for masonry work on the gymnasium wall.
Based on the reports he's received from the engineers, Smith said they don't believe they will have to dig underneath the building, but rather will be able to tie into existing supports. Most of the work will be done inside and some small portions of the building will be enclosed while the repairs are made.
The cost of the repairs will not be known until after a contractor is appointed in Spring, but Trenton Mayor Shannon MacInnis who chairs the building authority says that the repairs will not cost any of the municipal units anything extra.
“The current repairs will come from the capital reserve that has already been put aside, so as to not impact our budget,” said MacInnis. That’s good news for a building which has routinely operated with a deficit.
In 2019 the burden of that deficit on the municipalities shrank by $162,000 so that municipal contributions were $820,000 rather than the $982,000 paid the year before. Despite the upcoming repairs, costs to the municipalities are still optimistically predicted to shrink further to lower than $700,000.
“We have more than enough funds in capital reserve to cover this,” Smith said, citing information from Stantec. “This will be less than a third of the capital reserve’s budget.”
With files from Adam MacInnis.
