The Town of Sylvan Lake will need to dig a bit deeper into its pocket to fund a new water reservoir to serve the community.

It's a project the town has been planning since 2015 to improve the supply of potable water, the current system can handle up to 18,000 residents, the new water reservoir a population of 30,000.

Communications Officer Joanne Gaudet says they'll now need to borrow some money as the budget climbs above the $6.5 million they had planned for.

“When we sought out proposals for the project, we did have a deficit as far as what we had allocated for our budget, so we are going to have to create a borrowing bylaw and increase that budget to $10 million dollars as a result of the costs that we’ve seen for the project”.

Gaudet says the town will be able to recoup about 51% of the cost through off-site levies, however she notes they need to bank that to begin with.

Council also directed Administration to submit an application to the Provincial Government for funding under the Alberta Municipal Water/Wastewater Partnership grant program for the new North Water Reservoir.

Gaudet says it’s a key project to ensure the community has potable water for years to come, with not a lot of other options.

“The cost of water and the cost of wastewater is no longer kind of a secondary thought, or something that we can access without a lot of planning in advance and these kind of construction projects and the planning involved and the engineering involved to make sure that we minimize impact on our environment as well as provide these services to our residents comes at a cost”.

Construction is expected to start in May, completion pegged at 18 months.