It turns out it was a lot of fuss for nothing. After a summer of often heated conversation about a proposed camp to house the workers building the new Stanton Hospital — which had a convoluted evolution from a 200-person site in Kam Lake, to a Det’on Cho-supplied location outside of town on the Dettah road to a 150-person site behind the Fieldhouse — the whole thing is off.
According to a late-Friday press release from Dave Brothers of project builders Bird/Clark Stanton Joint Venture, after due diligence reviews of the development, “it became evident that many market and economic factors had changed the landscape of Yellowknife’s rental and hotel sectors inventory.” The recent opening of the Chateau Nova is apparently not one of those factors. This means that the consortium now has “renewed avenues for accommodating the staff resources needed to realize the construction project while mitigating potential risks in costs and schedules.”
“As such,” the release continues, the joint venture has “concluded that it is not in the Design-Builders best interest to develop a temporary accommodations and will in fact rely on the local commercial vendors to accommodate the accommodations aspect of the project.
“{T]he project is presently on schedule,” Brothers says, and “will see considerable resource loading in upcoming months and as such an influx of personnel into the City of Yellowknife for which we will continue working with local vendors to meet the project needs.” Translated: it’s probably going to be hard to get a hotel room in town for quite some time.
