Cost For Robertsville Ambulance Base Balloons To $670,000

Jeff Green | Sep 25, 2013

Frontenac County Council agreed last week to proceed with a contract for the construction of an ambulance base in North Frontenac Township. The contract was awarded to Argue Construction for $503,650.

However additional costs, including professional costs of $81,363 and an item listed in a report by Chief of Paramedic Services Paul Charbonneau as “other costs” of $51,686 will bring the total cost to $670,000.

The County has $450,000 budgeted for the project, and agreed to take the extra $220,000 from reserve funds in order to complete the project in the first part of 2014.

Charbonneau told Council that the cost works out to $288 per square foot for the stand alone building, a steep increase from the cost incurred for the construction of the Sydenham ambulance base just three years ago, which came in at $172 per square foot.

“In retrospect, I would say we got a very good deal when we built the Sydenham base,” said Charbonneau.

Part of the overrun stems from the decision that Council made to upgrade the status of the Robertsville base to a stand-alone ambulance base rather than an ambulance post, as had been originally planned. This means that the paramedics who will be providing service out of the base from 6 am to 6 pm daily will start and end their 12-hour shift at Robertsville. If it was only a post at that location the shifts would start and end at the Parham base, which would cut the North Frontenac-based service by the travel time from Parham to Robertsville, which is as much as 90 minutes each day.

Charbonneau also cited land acquisition fees and the cost of environmental assessments as partial reasons for the cost overrun.

However, the purchase price of the lot where the base will be located, which was paid to a private landowner, was only $20,000. That is less than half the $42,000 that the County paid to South Frontenac Township to buy the one acre where the Sydenham base was located.

The Robertsville base was originally slated to be built in Ompah, as part of a joint project with North Frontenac to build an ambulance base/fire hall complex. However that project was abandoned last year because North Frontenac balked at the projected cost.