The coming months are shaping up to be busy for The City of Flin Flon.
Summer construction season is in full swing, with multiple projects either underway or not far from beginning.
Once summer repaving and pothole projects are finished, the city will look at other projects – namely upgrades to two city-owned heating plants and repairs at the municipal reservoir, where some small leaks have been reported.
Electrical backup system upgrades and boiler fixes are due for the No. 1 heating plant, while some pumps will be upgraded at the No. 3 heating plant near Main Street.
“That’s on a conceptual level right now. We don’t know if we’re going to see any construction happening on that until later in the year or next year,” said Charles Boulet, the City of Flin Flon’s director of public works.
“Some of these things are pretty critical – the electrical upgrade to heating plant No. 1, that was actually in the works two years ago. We finally got grant money to do it and it just takes time to roll out the project.”
Another upcoming project will be pipe replacement near the Hundred Stairs.
“They’re getting so old in there and that’s a critical line – it feeds all the uptown area.
We’re looking at creating a bypass to upgrade the age of the lines and the fact that the old lines there are getting so old that they’re getting risky, as far as reliability.”
Budget allocations for these projects have not yet been made by the city, but Boulet said some expenses will be covered by grant money.
“We have a $4 million grant to do all the work except the paving. We try to get roads grants every year for about $125,000 – it used to be higher when we were considered a larger city. It used to be about a quarter of a million, now we’re down to about half of that,” he said.
Another key focus is replacement and maintenance of utilidors – those wooden structures throughout the community known informally as “sewer boxes.”
Boulet said sewer box fixes have become a higher priority for the city in recent years.
“There wasn’t really a program before that recognized all the boxes that needed upgrading. We’ve now dedicated crews – every spring until fall, we work on upgrading those boxes around the city. Eventually, people will start noticing that we’re catching up,” he said.
“The ones we’re working on are the ones we feel are more critical for various reasons, whether it’s the pipes being critical to the city or if it’s the box itself that we’re upgrading because the wood has gotten old and deteriorated.”
In the future, Boulet hopes to improve communication links between key city facilities.
“That’s in the conceptual stage, but the system is so old that it’s a reliability issue,” he said.
“Mostly it’s data lines, the lines of communication between our civic assets and properties – the water plant, city hall, the public works yard. It’s just the communications we need to maintain a proper water supply, communications from the water source to the reservoir, to all the heating plants, so we can bring things together at those facilities.”
City crews will continue work on roads around the community. The city’s largest paving project is underway on O’Reilly Avenue.
“The rest are patches like we usually do, to fix up past
