A motion was passed in Swift Current city council last night for significant upgrades to the existing south hill reservoir and pump house.

The $2.95-million improvements leading to increased water capacity are essential for the new Chinook Power Station and for growth within the city.

"The south side of the city has needed some additional pumping capacity because we've had some lower pressures that we've been trying to address in there," said Mitch Minken, GM of Infrastructure and Operations with the City of Swift Current. "The south hill reservoir feeds to the north hill reservoir which feeds the rest of the city. Increased capacity will help ensure that we are moving water up to the north hill reservoir allowing for growth within the city."

Half of the cost will be picked up by SaskPower as part of an agreement between the city and the crown corporation, leaving the city on the hook for the remaining $1.47-million.

"It's a major benefit for us," Minken said. "Even though there is some extra costs associated with having more pumping capacity to handle them (SaskPower). It's still a benefit for us because we would have had to be spending a lot of that money to do this increase in capacity for ourselves."

The city's 2017 capital budget allotted for $530,000 to complete the project, forcing council Monday evening to approve of an additional $950,000 in funds to cover the city's portion of the bill.

Hipperson Construction was awarded the bid at $2.64-million, with AECON receiving the remaining $291,000 for their engineering services.

Included in the upgrades are an additional pump house building, two additional wet wells, two pumps supplying the Chinook Power Station and two pumps supplying the City of Swift Current water distribution system.

The two added wet wells will be used to pump water from the reservoir into the wet well and then into the distribution system.

"In this case, we will have two chambers and we will be sharing these chambers to increase our redundancy," Minken explained. "Each chamber will have pumping for the Chinook Power Station line as well as our own distribution system, so each chamber will be able to pump to both systems at the same allowing us redundancy to do maintenance on pumps or the wet well itself."

The construction is excepted to begin shortly with a $50,000 a day penalty for SaskPower if water isn't provided to the Chinook Power Plant by May 2018.