Construction workers istall forming at the Aurora Sun construction site in northwest Medicine Hat on Friday, January, 18, 2019. -- NEWS PHOTO COLLIN GALLANT
Medicine Hat News
The city’s planning department’s year-end figures received a Christmas bonus last month — processing a permit for part of the Aurora Sun facility rocketed the value of building permits for the year well past the 2017 total.
In fact, the single permit, attached to an estimated $30 million in construction value, puts the total of the recent year about $28 million above the previous year’s total.
Officials, who earlier in the year expected to only keep pace with a busy 2017, say activity levels remained static even if their biggest file hadn’t come through.
“We really had a strong fourth quarter, even aside from the Aurora permit,” said Kent Snyder, the city’s manager of building and planning services. “It’s really pretty positive. It’s a fairly strong commercial and industrial year and a very nice multi-family component.
“Single-family (home) construction continued to lag, as it has for a couple of years.”
The biggest factor however, is the phase of the cannabis growing facility. Aurora’s 1.2-million-square-foot growing facility has been estimated to cost $130 million in total to construct.
Foundation work and a forming for a concrete tower were visible from the Box Springs Boulevard this week. The company has said it hopes to be harvesting crops in at least a portion of the building by mid-year.
“It’s such a big facility that they’re still designing portions of it as they’ve started building others,” said Snyder. “Those construction values will come in at different times, but there’s been a significant ‘next step’ in that building.”
Considering the remainder of the Aurora project will be permitted in 2019, this year is already off to a strong start.
“I was certain last year would meet what we (processed) in 2017, just because of Aurora,” said Snyder. “Looking forward, I don’t know if we’ll see much more growth (year to year), unless the residential sector starts to pick up. And it should at some point, because there has been so much on the commercial and industrial side. Theoretically that means jobs”
For the year, permits were attached to estimated budgets of $141.4 million. That’s compared to $113.8 million in 2017, which saw major commercial renovations, and larger than normal institutional spending, such as city projects, two schools and portions of work at Medicine Hat Regional Hospital.
This year, work on two southside hotels proceeded, as did a recently completed $12-million apartment block that added about 200 rental units.
New home building for the year remained essentially even with a sluggish 2017. A total of 47 new single-family homes were permitted during the year, worth just less than $14 million. The same figures from 2017 were 52 permits and $15.7 million.
Spending on duplexes remained steady at 18 projects — considered an active level — while other multi-family projects was up. Triplex and townhouse projects created 30 units, double the 2017 figure, on spending of $5.5 million.
New commercial projects kept pace with an active 2017, rising to $20.2 million, up about 10 per cent in value. Slightly lower institutional spending was more than offset by industrial permits, where two other permits were worth a combined $3.6 million.
