The Village of Burns Lake is set to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue from services usage under an agreement with TC Energy.
TC, formerly known as TransCanada will pay for water and sewage services at its work camp north of Tchesinkut Lake, which will be built near the end of the year.
READ MORE: New work camp site picked for Coastal GasLink Pipeline project
The 7 Mile Road multi-use site is expected to accommodate as many as 600 labourers who will build a section of the Coastal GasLink (CGL) pipeline that will run from northeastern British Columbia to a facility in Kitimat.
Under a plan between the village and TC, a water station and a sewage receiving station will be built to provide the camp with potable water and sewage services. TC will be billed for its consumption.
The water station will be located on Eveneshen Road, across from the site where the new water treatment plant is being built. The sewer station will be constructed near the sewage lagoons south of Richmond Loop, as Dale Ross, Director of Public Works told the village council at its meeting on Sept. 10.
Those facilities and their construction will cost about $237,000, which will be reimbursed by Civeo, a work camp provider company hired by CGL. The stations will become village assets.
While the 7 Mile Road site is outside village boundaries and under the jurisdiction of the Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako, there are no other facilities near the camp site that could offer water and sewage services.
“This will generate revenue for the village while not putting additional strains on our system,” as Sheryl Worthing, Chief Administrative Officer told Lakes District News.
Potable water will be provided to the camp for $8 per cubic metre, according to a village council report. Sewage will be discharged into the existing sewer lagoon system and treated for the same amount.
Those figures are based on averages of what other municipalities charge for water and sewage, said Ross.
The estimated services usage of the camp over its lifespan from from January of 2020 to April of 2021 is 24,000 cubic metres each of water and sewage effluent, generating $192,000 in revenue for each. Those quantities were based on estimates from TC.
It is expected that the new facilities will be constructed by January, Worthing said.
The CGL pipeline project comprises eight sections starting in the Groundbirch area just west of Dawson Creek and running west to Kitimat.
RELATED: Pipeline work to start in 2020, CGL says
The part of the pipeline passing just south of Burns Lake falls under section six of the project, and its construction will be contracted out to Pacific Atlantic Pipeline Construction. That company will also build section seven, which runs from south of Houston to east of Kitimat.
Blair McBride
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