Penn-Co Construction has won the contract to build a second water treatment plant in Steinbach. It submitted the lowest of six bids for the project at $11.3 million which was still higher than the budget set out by the city. City council agreed Tuesday to scale back the project a bit and has come up with some additional funding. $753,000 worth of work was deleted, mostly by removing some of the storm sewer piping and concrete resurfacing. It also decided to use some surplus funds to increase the budget and the project will now come in at 10.6 million dollars. Mayor Chris Goertzen is pleased they were able to come up with a solution, noting they did not want to risk losing $5.6 million in federal and provincial funding.

"Obviously we needed to make some adjustments to make sure it came in on budget. We did have to cut a few of the non-essentials out of the program as well as we did have to find a few dollars form the surplus from last year when it came to the Utility Fund. Council wants to see this proceed. We have a tremendous partnership with the federal government as well as the provincial government."

The project will now be done at a cost of 10.6 million dollars.

City councillor John Fehr moved approval of the project, noting this will be a valuable asset for the city, providing capacity for further growth and as a back-up to the city's other water source.

"It's the biggest project that we've undertaken as a city. We've got way bigger support than we've ever gotten from any levels of government in the past, so it was something we needed to do. Fortunately, we had been fairly frugal in the past and were able to tap into some other areas where we did have some funds available so that it's not going to affect our tax base at all."

Mayor Goertzen says he is looks forward to seeing Penn-Co build this facility and expects the project to get underway shortly.