The Smithers Golf and Country Club has been denied funding for new pumphouse.
The club had recently applied for a grant through the Northern Development Initiative Trust but did not get it.
Club president Andrew L’Orsa said it is disappointing.
“We’re having to go back to the drawing board a little bit and try and figure out our next steps,” he said. “But, you know, that’s kind of the nature of these grants. You got to just keep trying.”
The Pumphouse Replacement Project, as part of the club’s investment in new irrigation equipment, will replace the aging pumphouse located on the course and provide protection to the water supply that services the entire course.
L’Orsa said the pump infrastructure has been upgraded over the course of the past three years, but the building housing it has not yet been repaired.
“We put all this time and effort and money into upgrading the irrigation system. And in order to bring it to a close and complete it, we really need to upgrade the pumphouse,” he said.
The pumphouse will also be used for storage and will improve safety for workers, as well as make everything run more efficiently.
“It’s all computerized, you can set your sprinklers to go off at 5 a.m. And everything’s kind of ticking along. Right now we’re having to have personnel manually turn on sprinklers, move hoses to other places. So it’s quite labour intensive. So as for us as an organization, you know, it’s really both trying to make our operations more efficient and make sure we run on a really, really tight budget that we can use our labour cost or our workers in more appropriate means in order to make the golf course be the best that it can be.”
The cost for the project will be well over $100,000, L’Orsa estimated.
According to the recent grant application, the current pumphouse, while not immediately dangerous, is in a state of repair that could become dangerous over the coming years. It was constructed at a time when building codes were either not in effect or much more relaxed than they are currently.
With this in mind, it would be much more cost-effective to replace the entire building, rather than trying to retrofit it to current standards.
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