City hall preparation going well, says mayor

CORNER BROOK - Mayor Charles Pender said Park Street will remain a single-lane road from Main Street to the middle of the former Co-op parking lot until at least this spring.

Corner Brook city council received an update on the deconstruction project at the site of the former Corner Brook Co-op Building and the future city hall at their regular meeting Monday evening.

Rather than move the fence and allowing two lanes of traffic, then moving it again, the city will leave the fence in place.

Pender said the project is going well and is within the time line the engineers have set. He said there will be a concrete slab left on the ground until spring, but that won't affect the construction project.

"Things take time and things and there's always unforeseen things," Pender said. "The biggest piece was the environmental work that had to be done. That took two months, when I think they were looking at a month or so.

"It seems like things are progressing well and they're on schedule. They're well within their time frames."

He said tearing the structure apart and being able to reuse as much as possible was comparable to knocking the building down and carting it off to the dump. He also said it saved space in Wild Cove by recycling and reusing as much as possible.

Pender told The Western Star the construction of the new building should begin this either late spring, or early summer.

"We're still waiting to hear on the financing for the library piece. Once that's confirmed, if it is confirmed, then we can move forward with the entire design and get that moving and do the tendering. The rest of the building has been designed, but we can't go the rest of the way without that piece.

"Hopefully we'll hear from the province on financing and from there we'll look at construction. So tenders in March and in April, May or June - somewhere around there - we'll be starting construction."

During the meeting Coun. Neville Greeley questioned whether the project was on schedule. He thought there was a cheaper and quicker way of demolishing the building.

He said claims at the meeting that the careful, piece-by-piece deconstruction is just as economical as the quick demolition of the complex has to be taken at face value. How the project will be funded, he's not sure.

"There's a bunch of acronyms that have been thrown around with regard to LEED, green, transit money and gas money," Greeley said, following the meeting. "I guess at the end of the day the largest contributors (to a new city hall) are going to be the city of Corner Brook and the provincial government, if they decide to come onside. If the provincial government turns it down, it's a dead issue.

"I can't see the city committing this much money to the building of a new city hall without full approval from the province. I would think that's a given."