By Mark Squibb
The Town of Paradise will pay out of pocket for a new public works depot as the old depot, which was damaged by fire along with the adjacent town hall in February last year was only insured for repairs, not reconstruction.
Mayor Patrick Martin said the assessed value of the depot repairs is approximately $2.26 million, but insurance coverage was limited to repairs only and cannot be applied to construction of a new depot. Instead, the Town is opting to build an entirely new depot.
Martin said that plans for a new depot have been underway for years, and that now is the time to rebuild, citing both Paradise’s continuous growth and the extent of the fire damage.
“We needed a new depot at some point in time,” said Martin. “This seems, ultimately, to be the time to proceed with this. It gives us a bigger footprint, it gives us more flexibility to add pieces of equipment, and we can store them inside in a safer manner.”
Martin said the old depot was outdated.
The new depot will be sandwiched between McNamara Drive the Dianne Whalen Soccer Complex, just a hop and a skip down the road from the existing depot on McNamara.
While construction of the new depot will be paid for out of pocket, the Town is taking the $3.5 million in insurance money it is getting for the depot and the damage to the Town Hall and putting it towards the rehabilitation of the Town Hall.
Martin said $1.2 million of that $3.5 million is money related to the depot fire.
“The Town Hall is going to have a full rehabilitation,” said Martin. “It’s going to be modernized and the electrical is going to be updated. Accessibility is a big thing for our Town Hall as well. We have some accessibility challenges that we are hoping to improve. We need to be totally accessible these days. And council chambers is going to be upgraded.”
Work on the Town Hall, said Martin, should be completed by the end of the year. The construction schedule for the depot, meanwhile, is harder to nail down.
As to whether the current depot will be demolished, Martin said the Town is still in the early planning stages and that will be determined down the road. The mayor said it’s unlikely the Town Hall will expand onto the footprint of the old depot, which had been attached to the Town Hall.
Martin said the fire is believed to have started in one of the Town’s dump trucks, while it was inside the depot. Asked if the Town was liable for any of the damage, Martin responded in the negative.
“We did nothing wrong on the Town’s end,” said the mayor. “There was no fault on the Town at all. There was definitely nothing on the Town’s end that caused the fire.”
The $3.5 million in insurance compensation does not include compensation for vehicles and equipment damaged by the fire. The Town will receive $479,229 for replacement, repair and cleaning of vehicles and equipment.
“Some of our equipment was in really good shape,” said Martin. “But as vehicles get older, their assessed value goes down dramatically, and we didn’t get back even close to what we were hoping for covering off new purchases.”
Both the Town Hall and the depot were covered by the same insurance policy. Meanwhile other claims, including building contents, are still ongoing.
The Town wrote off three vehicles damaged by the fire totalling about $402,500.
In March, council hired WSP E&I Canada Ltd. in the amount of $550,633 to oversee the design and construction of the new depot. Martin did not have an estimate of the cost to build a new depot, or to repair and modernize the Town Hall.
The town has been renting its former town hall building on Topsail Road in the interim for office space, and a property in Mount Pearl as a temporary depot.
The fire came on the heels of a number of other misfortunates the Town has suffered in recent years, not the least of which was the catastrophic failure of Lift Station No. 10 in 2019 and its subsequent $24 million replacement that has yet to be fully commissioned.
“It seems to be one thing after the other,” said Martin. “Between the lift station, Snowmageddon, the wildfires, it’s been one thing after another for our staff. We have excellent staff, but they can’t seem to catch a break. Hopefully this is the last hurdle, and we can move forward in a positive way.”
