As it gets closer to crossing the finish line, təməsew̓txʷ Aquatic and Community Centre is on pace to be pretty close to being on time and on budget – despite encountering significant challenges in the early stages of construction.
In an April 8 update to council, staff reported that all facility construction activities for Phase 1 are complete, and crews are working on the final touches and deficiencies to aspect of the facility, such as interior finishes, millwork, specialty accessories and the final clean.
The community centre is set to open on April 29 and the aquatic centre will open on May 14.
In a February 2023 update, staff told council the new aquatic and community centre was expected to open in February 2024. Originally projected to cost $106 million, council approved an $8 million budget increase to the project in June 2022, due in large part to worse-than-anticipated soil conditions that had depleted the project’s construction contingency.
At that time, staff told council the city had anticipated there would be issues with the land, but it was worse than had been anticipated despite “fairly significant” testing. Built on a ravine that had been filled in decades earlier, crews found tree stumps, car parts and other things when excavating the site.
At the time of the February 2023 update, staff said the budget was expected to be $114 million.
This month’s report to council stated the project is expected to stay within the currently approved capital budget of $114.6 million.
“I cannot express how good news a story it is that we've got a $114-million recreation centre built on time, within a few months of being on time, and within five per cent of being on budget,” Mayor Patrick Johnstone told the Record earlier this year. “We had ground issues that we dealt with early, and that caused us to have an increase in our budget of about five per cent.”
Johnstone said the construction went through COVID, a concrete strike, a supply chain crisis and a massive inflation crisis.
Johnstone said staff did a “great job” to keep the project’s costs down – but he said the city also got a little lucky.
“In March 2020, we delayed procurement. We were going to procure in March 2020. We had uncertainty because of COVID. We delayed procurement by several months, just because we didn't know what was happening with the world economy with COVID,” he recalled. “Several months later … we made the decision to go ahead, and I think that was a monumental decision. If we had waited a year to do that, the cost of that project could easily have doubled. I think that was, in hindsight, a really, really good decision the city made.”
Some Metro Vancouver communities, including the City of Burnaby and the City of North Vancouver have seen costs of recreation projects increase.
Planning and good luck
Dean Gibson, the City of New Westminster’s director of parks and recreation, credited the project’s timing and budget results to several factors.
“There was a window of time when the construction industry was being very competitive in their pricing, and we happened to be going to market during a lot of that work,” he said. “So, I put that under the good luck category more than anything else.”
But, continued Gibson, New Westminster was “very strategic” in hiring a project management company, Turnbull Construction Project Managers, which has worked with the staff in the city’s properties division on the project’s construction components.
“That's been a very positive working relationship,” he said. “Our work with the project contractor, Heatherbrae, they were engaged early, early on in the process. So, they helped inform the design of things so that we weren't running into surprises of having a design that then was driving tender prices beyond the expectations that we had.
What worked for the City of New Westminster was doing early advanced planning, having a really strong team that worked together as a team, and being very committed to a scope, a timeline and a budget, Gibson said.
“I can't point to any one thing that says: this is the way everybody should be doing it,” he told the Record.
An April 8 report to council states that Phase 1 of the project, which includes the aquatic and community centre, and the south parking lot containing 119 of the total 375 parking spaces, is in the final stages of completion.
Phase 2 construction, which includes exterior site improvements and construction of vehicle parking (on the larger portion of the site where Canada Games Pool and Centennial Community Centre once stood) should be complete by the end of July, which is a month ahead of the original project schedule.
Despite the geotechnical issues that arose in the early stages of construction, Gibson said the completion date for Phase 2 work is still within the project’s original time frame.
“I think that’s just a testament to all cylinders firing the way we needed them to, to get us to where we want to be,” he said. “And no criticism on the challenges of other municipalities because I don't know the factors that are there. But what I have learned is projects of this scale are really, really complicated. And it's rarely ever one thing that can pull a project significantly off track; it is usually a series of small stuff.”
Gibson said city council has been supportive of the project since the beginning and has provided oversight where it needed to provide oversight.
“They were very clear in terms of what the expectations were for the facility, and that helped the rest of the team know the parameters that we needed to operate within it,” he said. “So, it really was that team effort.”
Gibson said thousands of community members also played a role in the way the project has progressed by taking part in the engagement process about what they wanted the facility to look like – building a planning foundation for the project.
“I think all of those, when you stack those things up, that's what I feel is some of our success,” he told the Record. “And when I have spoken to some of our counterparts who have had other projects that have had rockier starts, usually some components of those have been missing in their processes. We have fortunately, in our city, sailed through that.”
