If all goes as planned, construction on the Saskatchewan Energy Training Institute will begin within the next week.Â鶹´«Ã½AVeast Regional College CEO Craig Brown said the SRC came to an agreement recently with Quorex Construction Services and its expected that work on the facility, which will be located in the Glen Peterson Industrial Subdivision, should start in the very near future."We went out to tender for the new building and the initial tender came back slightly higher than we had anticipated so we have been working on whittling that down and as of Thursday of last week we had just signed the agreement with Quorex," said Brown."I am hoping to meet with them and the architects this week to clean up any loose ends and sign off on everything but I am anticipating they should be on the site within the next week."Brown said he is excited to finally move to the construction stage. It was announced in late 2009 that the ETI would be located in Estevan. Since then he and ETI general manager Trent Jordens have been hard at work behind the scenes handling the myriad of tasks that come with a project of this magnitude. "Well, it will be nice to see something happen," Brown said with a chuckle. "It's taken a lot of time to get to this point, there is a lot of planning involved but the overall plans for the building are totally complete."Although they were forced to make some changes due to the aforementioned budget issues, Brown said they have not deviated from the stunning design that was presented at the sod turning ceremony in November."It will be a beautiful looking building," he said. "I am very confident that we will have a building that will be a centre of excellence for energy training and certainly something that the City of Estevan and the college can be proud of."We were a little over (budget) so we had to take some things out of the initial build. We are not going to be paving the parking lot right off the bat so there are some things we will have to look at adding after we have moved into the building. But overall the building hasn't changed."Funding for the over $14 million facility is being provided by both the federal and provincial governments through the educational component of the Building Canada stimulus project. One of the strings on the money was that any projects that qualify for funding must be complete by the end of March 2011, which obviously leaves a short window for construction.Brown said although they will be pressed for time, they should be able to use some of the building by March."It's gonna be tight," he admitted. "One of the requirements is that we have to at least occupy part of the building by March 31, 2011 and as far as I know the contractors have said they can do that. We are meeting with them later this week to hammer out some clear timelines and what we can expect and what the various milestones will be in the construction process."
