On time and under budget: the City of Kamloops says major renovations on the Canada Games Pool last year cost a little less than expected.

The project was to replace the entire building envelope, and renovate some amenities indoors.

Capital Projects Manager Darren Crundwell says council had approved a budget of $13.5 million for the work, and the contract came in $200,000 dollars under budget.

He says the leftover funds were re-invested into the pool.

“Our score clock was from the 1990s, it’s old, it doesn’t support events. That wasn’t part of the scope of the project. But obviously when we have savings and we go through proper approvals to authorize doing other things with the money, that’s what we did,” Crundwell says. “Replacing that, and we put new bleachers because they didn’t allow for accessibility improvements. So we looked at a couple things and we utilized the money, but we were under budget on the contract.”

Crundwell says other more minor maintenance upgrades were also done with some of the leftover money.

The pool was completely closed for six months for construction, from July to early January, which happened to coincide with the COVID-19 pandemic. The project had been in the works for many years before work was carried out.

(Photo: Twitter @mikeoreilly2018)