Enniskillen Mayor Kevin Marriott hopes a larger salt storage shed will help improve road maintenance in the township.

Council, public works employees and a few dignitaries officially opened the building Friday with a ribbon cutting.

The township had been wanted to replace the former shed for years. The walls were beginning to rot and there wasn’t much room to store large amounts of road salt.

“We talked about it for some 10 years and tried to get funding from the upper levels of government but every time we tried, it didn’t work,” says Marriott.

When the walls of the old building started rotting at the back, council decided to fund the $400,000 project on its own, using some reserves and paying the rest off over the next decade.

“We’re hoping it will pay back in savings in time,” says Marriott.

“This will give us the ability to buy salt in bigger quantities. Before, we could never buy enough and the public works guys were unloading salt when you should have been out spreading it.” Marriott says the new shed will be able to store about half the salt the township needs for the winter. It has a purchasing agreement with the county to buy the product at a lower cost.

The building also contains a storage area for supplies for the water system and the hardware used around the township.

“It isn’t a big project on some scales but fore us, it’s big, especially with no federal or provincial funding.”