Tendering of Municipal Engineering in the Crowsnest Pass

Over the weekend I spoke to a number of people about my letter to the editor regarding the "Sentinel Bridge", which is really about a much larger issue that of the lack of tendering of Municipal Engineering for the Crowsnest Pass Infrastructure projects.
Below is the letter I sent to the paper, I would like to reinforce once again this is not about questioning the quality of work provided by Stantec. Its only about ensuring that we have the best possible deal we has a Municipality can receive for our engineering.

Dear Editor

I would like to respond to a recent article in the local media. Intriguing to see it titled “On a Baffling Council Issue”, I read articles and columns every week that at first glance appear to discuss a local issue and then very quickly become a political tool for certain parts of the media to paint an impression of an issue, or the person involved that is what’s “baffling”.
Lets talk about the article, first of all clarification Council was discussing the Engineering for the bridge out at Sentinel, not the actual building of the bridge itself. The province as only offered to cover the cost of the engineering at this time; the article implies that the province as committed to build the bridge that is not correct. Once the engineering is done, we would enter the line up of projects seeking provincial funding, we all no, how fast that works look at the progress on the Highway 3 issue.
The bridge engineering was brought to Council’s attention on July 20, at that point, we had a debate about the issue and yes, I had concerns. I am a strong believer that every dollar of taxpayer’s money should be used to receive the maximum value. How do we do that? One of the ways is by tendering out for services that the municipality requires, a very large cost we have incurred over the years is engineering.
All of this engineering as been performed by the firm of Stantec for at least the last seven years. Now I have no issue with Stantec they appear to be providing us with whatever we need from an engineering point of view, are they charging us a competitive rate? Maybe, neither I nor the rest of the Council knows because we have not tendered out for that service.
This issue has been raised on various occasions over the last three years, Council was told that we could not look at other engineering firms because all of the various projects that the municipality was working on were already started by Stantec as part of our long term Infrastructure plan and that to bring in another firm would duplicate work and costs.
So along comes the Sentinel Bridge project, which is a totally separate project from any of our present Infrastructure and presents a good opportunity to see if other companies are interested in bidding on our engineering work, for whatever reason the Mayor decided not to call for a vote on the issue at that time. So yes, when it was raised on August 10 there was not that much debate that had already happened
It also astounds me that people that are often critical about the ways the Municipal government spends their tax dollars, make comments about not understanding why council would be concerned because the engineering was fully funded by the province.
(Are those not tax dollars)
In conclusion my issue was not the Sentinel Bridge Engineering, it is the fact that we have for at least the last seven years, handed over millions of dollars in taxpayers money to one company to do all of our engineering with no competition to see if we are getting the best deal.

Dean Ward