Monday, March 28, 2011

AMM - Association of Manitoba Municipalities

AMM - Association of Manitoba Municipalities

The Core Challenges for Municipalities
• Municipal government plays a greater role in the lives of Canadians than any
other time in history and the new realities facing municipalities have serious
repercussions as they diligently try to balance growing responsibilities with
stagnant revenues.
• Municipal infrastructure is the very foundation of a community, yet its current
state leaves communities with little hope for prosperity. Nationally the municipal
infrastructure deficit is in excess of $123 billion and provincially it is estimated
at over $11 billion, or a staggering $10,000 per Manitoban.
• As well, municipal responsibilities continue to grow, either through the
intentional or unintentional offloading of responsibilities or new unfunded
mandates being forced on municipalities.
• Because of these challenges municipalities must have access to new sources of
revenues. Options include the Province collecting a one cent municipal tax to be
allocated to municipalities for infrastructure, a rebate of the Provincial Sales Tax
paid by municipalities, or an increase to existing revenue sources such as VLTs.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Lunch Buffet


Sat with the reps from Portage La Prairie,and reps from region as an acronym WT___/ which is the region surrounding PLP. Some had just been newly elected. Is it true that there is a french fries processing plant? which is surrounded by Potato fields?

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

U.S. will do new studies on Keystone XL tar sands pipeline(see Map)

U.S. will do new studies on Keystone XL tar sands pipeline Greenspace Los Angeles Times

The U.S. State Department is going to require additional environmental studies before granting a permit for the 1,660-mile Keystone XL pipeline, proposed to carry oil from the tar sands of northern Canada through the U.S. heartland and on to south Texas.

In an announcement Tuesday, department officials said they would open a new round of public comments on a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, to be released in mid-April, with a decision on whether to grant a permit for the controversial pipeline now expected by the end of the year.

Pipeline opponents have long called for new environmental reviews, looking especially at the ability of a standard oil pipeline to safely carry the diluted bitumen found in the tar sands of northern Alberta.

A study last month by three of the nation's biggest environmental organizations and the Pipeline Safety Trust warned of a higher risk of corrosion-related spills linked to higher levels of abrasives, temperature and acidity in tar sands oil -- claims that TransCanada, the pipeline builder, has rebutted. Download Keystone XL Fact Sheet TransCanada

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Ellerbe Becket,Architectural firm/St.Paul/Minn/AECOM.

Ellerbe Becket

Let me guess...

AECOM, with a staff of 260 people alone in Manitoba, is going to build a company town based on the nickel deposits around Mystery Lake.

Mystery Lake,Manitoba

Mystery Lake, located approximately 12 km northeast of the city of
Thompson in the northern part of the Thompson Nickel Belt (TNB), is
underlain by variably deformed members of the Ospwagan Group
comprising siliciclastic and chemical metasedimentary rocks and mafic
and ultramafic volcanic and plutonic rocks. The geology of the Mystery
Lake area was investigated as a contribution to the multiyear,
multidisciplinary CAMIRO investigation of the TNB (Peck, GS-3, this volume).
In Mystery Lake, the Ospwagan Group is bounded to the
northwest by the Paleoproterozoic Mystery Lake granodioritic pluton
(1.836 Ga, U-Pb monazite age; Syme et al., 1993) and to the southwest
by Archean polymetamorphic ortho- and paragneisses that are interpreted
as retrograded parts of the Pikwitonei granulite domain (Weber, 1990). At
Mystery Lake, heterolithic gabbro intrudes and partially assimilates a
sequence of Ospwagan Group felsic detrital metasedimentary rocks that
include quartzite, arkose, and wacke, interpreted as parts of the Setting
Lake formation. Pillowed, massive and brecciated basalt flows and
interlayered, spinifex-textured ultramafic volcanic rocks are interpreted to
be coeval and possibly cosanguineous.
Partially sulphidized oxide facies iron formation is associated with
felsic and pelitic sediments and intruded by gabbro. The sulphidization of
this iron formation may have resulted from
metasomatism caused by the thermal aureole of the gabbroic intrusion.

INTRODUCTION
Ultramafic rocks in the Mystery Lake area were first reported in 1972
(Coats et al., 1972). Mapping of the Mystery Lake area by R.F.J. Scoates
(Weber and Scoates, 1976) determined that the ultramafic rocks occur in
conjunction with metasedimentary and mafic metavolcanic rocks. The
stratigraphy of the Ospwagan Group in the Thompson Nickel Belt
acquired a special significance subsequent to the discovery of the nickel
deposits in the belt and the recognition that most of the mineralized
ultramafic bodies occur in the Pipe Formation of the Ospwagan Group.
Mystery Lake is underlain by both the Ospwagan Group and a
deformed occurrence of ultramafic intrusive rocks (Weber and Scoates,
1976) that contains nickel-copper sulphide deposits. A two-week

Welcome to the City of Thompson AECOM

Welcome to the City of Thompson

is a professional technical and management support services firm. The company is ranked as the number one design firm for 2010 by Engineering News-Record and number one by Architectural Record.[1][2] It provides services in the areas of transportation, facilities, environmental, energy, water and government. With approximately 45,000 employees, AECOM is listed at #352 on the Fortune 500 list.[3]

The name AECOM is an acronym for Architecture, Engineering, Consulting, Operations and Management.

An upcoming $20-million Toronto-York subway extension.
A $US12.5-million contract renewal providing environmental and engineering services to the U.S. Coast Guard.
A US$210-million contract to provide program management services for Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
A $149-million port project in Doha, Qatar.
A US$210-million project that will help develop a cultural district for the Abu Dhabi tourism bureau.
A US$17.4-million contract for the King Abdullah Financial District in Saudi Arabia.
A US$147-million program-management contract for San Francisco Central Subway.
A US$945-million contract for the from the US Army Engineering and Support Center Worldwide Environmental Remediation Services.
A US$3-billion Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract for the U.S. Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment.
A US$945-million IDIQ contract for the U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center in Huntsville, AL.
A US$53-million IDIQ contract from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)to provide economic-consulting services to Iraq through the Iraq financial sector development Program.
A US$50-million USAID task order task order under the Support Which Implements Fast Transitions III (SWIFT III) Indefinite Quantity Contract (IQC)for the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID)Sudan peace program.
A US$11.7-million construction-management joint venture contract for Express Road S17 in Poland.
A US$82-million USAID contract for Southern Africa Trade Hub program.
Two task orders worth up to US$US$47.3 million for runway reconstruction projects at U.S. Air Force bases in Washington and Illinois.
One of four firms awarded contract worth up to US$60 million for planning and engineering services at U.S. Navy and Marine Corps facilities worldwide.
A US$532-million five-year joint venture framework contract for Yorkshire Water.