By Justine Kelsie

Province announces new contractor for Grande Prairie Regional Hospital build

Nov 16, 2018 | 1:04 PM

The province has announced Clark Builders as the new contractor for the Grande Prairie Regional Hospital.

Construction is expected to resume in the new year, according to a tweet from Minister of Infrastructure Sandra Jansen this afternoon. 

They will be using a “phased-in approach” which the province says will give a chance to finalize agreements with the sub-trades.

On the Government of Alberta website, they say “work on the new hospital will resume shortly and construction activity is expected to ramp up in January”.

Pleased to announce that we have selected @clarkbuilders as the new construction manager for the Grande Prairie Regional Hospital. Full construction activity is expected to resume in the new year.
For further information, go to: https://t.co/OLtgUMrA5Q#ableg #abpoli #gpab pic.twitter.com/CLhQwy1Ak3

— Sandra Jansen (@SANDRAYYCNW) November 16, 2018

CEO of the Clark Builders Group of Companies Paul Verhesen says they are quite pleased and honoured to be awarded the new contract to finish the hospital. 

“The plan is to first appreciate and see what is in place and what work has been completed to date and then based on that, formulate a plan to complete the project.  We have some folks that will be doing that, they will be spending time on site analzying what’s in place and what it’s going to take to finish it off,” he said.

Christine Holmes, Manager of Marketing and Communications for the company says they are looking forward to getting started and delivering a world class facility for Grande Prairie and the province.

“As soon as we learned that the project was going to go back out to the marketplace, yes, absolutley we were very keen to be involved and to get the right people together to take on the project.  We work with quite a variety of individuals and we try to find people that are specific to sectors. We got the leading team for health care projects together and made sure that they were available and really worked to strategize on our proposal and to showcase what we were able to bring to the table,” she said.

We knew that the province had picked a contractor at the beginning of November but, at the time, the government didn’t share who it was.

Construction has been on hold since September when the province announced it had fired Graham Construction. Graham said it did not get fired but left on its own because the hospital could not be completed as designed for the money that was available. 

The total cost of the project is now at $763-million.
 

w/ files from Sheena Roszell