WELLINGTON COUNTY — County council has officially agreed on how much they're willing to spend on the Wellington Place pavilion; what it will look like is another story.
Approving a $900,000 budget for the Wellington Place pavilion project at a county council meeting last week, Information, Heritage and Seniors' Committee chair, County Councillor Mary Lloyd said the new budget represents an increase of $125,000 and is to be funded through the county property reserve.
Council also approved tendering the project through a design-build format, in an attempt to save money on architect costs and to allow the contractor and county to be "creative" in figuring out how to achieve the proposed features.
This follows county council's surprise decision to revisit the project's proposed design in favour of something that fits the previously established budget provision of $775.000.
"This might not be the end of the process, this might be a step in the process and we may learn and discover through the process that we want to take a different direction," said Lennox. "So I don't think we should say this is a straight line from where we are today to the other number, I think there's a road we're going to have to travel down to make this process work to what we want."
While supportive of the plan, Coun. Doug Breen said his only concern is where the $900,000 number came from and how much confidence the committee has that this is an accurate projection.
In response, Coun. Earl Campbell clarified that the last cost estimate came back at around $2.1 million and the committee is hopeful the $900,000 budget will be adequate if a $1/square foot strategy is used, similar to pavilion projects in neighbouring counties.
"So what we're hopeful of is if we go with the design-build that we end up with a contractor that, for lack of a better word, will give us a fairly standard-looking pavilion...nothing super fancy," said Campbell.
Isabel Buckmaster is the Local Journalism Initiative reporter for GuelphToday. LJI is a federally-funded program.
