Moncton council questions payment as architect selected to build new Codiac RCMP detachment

Moncton city councillors have awarded a Request for Proposal to RPL Architects to do architectural and engineering work on the new Codiac RCMP building.

While the city voted unanimously to award the contract, there were questions raised about ownership, interest rates and payment schedules.

Moncton is expected to pay for 70 per cent of the building, while Dieppe and Riverview are expected to pay the remaining 30 per cent of costs.

But Councillor Brian Hicks asked if Moncton would pay the upfront costs and then be paid back by the other municipalities.

“Yes, probably,” said Don MacLellan, the city’s general manager of community safety services. “Right now, we do a lot of the bookkeeping for the CRPA (Codiac Regional Policing Authority).”

The wording of the response concerned councillors Hicks, Paul Pellerin and Bryan Butler.

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“When you’re talking $30 to 40 million, I don’t like to hear, this far into the game, the word ‘probably,'” says Butler.

Marc Landry, the city’s manager, says more answers to questions regarding scheduled payments and factored interest rates will be provided before the next steps are taken.

“We’ll have our professionals actually working,” he said. “In the meantime, before we finalize the next steps, we can bring those details forward.”

The cost of the facility has been estimated to be between $40 to 50-million, but MacLellan says that needs to be determined.

“We’re entering into a phase where we will truly work hard with our project managers and with our architect to design the building we need,” he said. “Through that process, we will work up a construction cost.”

The current Codiac Regional RCMP detachment, which sits on Main Street in Moncton, opened in 1980.

It’s just over 36,000 square feet, but no longer meets design standards of the RCMP and is too small for its members.

Moncton councillors approved the purchase of new land at the west end of Albert Street, near Vaughan Harvey Boulevard and Assomption Boulevard two weeks ago.

The land near the rail tracks was chosen from a handful of sites within 1.5 kilometres from the courthouse.

“We used a scoring system to assign each potential property a score, evaluated those scores and came up with the best location,” says Ross MacKay, who sits on the building committee for the Codiac Regional Policing Authority. “Then (we) worked at price and so on, so we’re very pleased — we achieved the best location.”

The cost of the land is $2.45-million.

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Timelines in 2017 scheduled the building to be open by 2020, but Ross MacKay of the Codiac Regional Police Authority’s building committee, says it’s a complex project.

“The magnitude of the process to get the right building and the right location and ensure that it will do the job for us for the next 25 to 30 years.”

MacKay says the drawings and drafting phase is expected to take eight to 12 months.

“The best guesstimate for construction timeframe is 18 to 24 months after the contract has been awarded,” he said. “We’re still looking at mid-year 2022.”