Niverville Mayor Myron Dyck

As the Town of Niverville continues to rapidly expand, it continues to expend a significant amount of money tendering contracts to engineering firms for its many projects.

Mayor Myron Dyck says those costs can be hefty as engineers are quite often busy and have higher prices that reflect that, and tendering a project also takes some time.

"We're getting to a point where we're almost too big to do that because of time and the prices we're getting on tender," Dyck describes.  "We're still too small to have a full-time engineer on payroll, so council is asking if we could have an engineer on contract or retainer."

Council met with an engineer for roughly an hour during its latest council meeting, and Dyck explains what they spoke about.

"Council brought in a gentleman with a certain engineering firm not to sell their engineering firm, but as someone who could answer questions in general about how engineering firms would prefer to operate, what services they provide and how it would work if a community or municipality acquired their services."

In addition to cost saving, accountability is also a major part of their engineering research.  Dyck says there have been times in the past when a project has been completed by the developer and handed back to the town, only to find there are deficiencies that the town must pay to fix.  He notes Town Council does not have any training or experience in engineering, and as such they want to bring someone in who can help approve agreements from their side to prevent any deficiencies.

"The first two key things we need to work on as council is we need to have a more thorough development agreement," Dyck says of what they took away from the meeting with the engineer.  "We need to definitely have our own engineer's input into a development agreement to make sure that all clauses are involved.  the second thing is that we need to review our municipal standards on an ongoing basis."

The Town's annual planning session will take place later in January, and Dyck says they will further discuss the possibility of hiring an engineer on retainer there.