The Rural Municipality of Portage la Prairie Council yesterday approved signing their agreement with Roquette to construct a huge pea-processing facility south of the city. Now that everything's official, Deputy Reeve Roy Tufford says there's some work they've agreed to look after.

"We have to start our process of getting the part of the agreement that we've committed to do. We agreed to do a bunch of site prep for them. We won't do that with our own equipment, we'll contract it out, but we've agreed to spend a certain amount of dollars on preparing the site."

Tufford says they'll be taking care of things like interior roads, elevations, and filling.

"I wouldn't be surprised if tenders went out this month, then the work would get started as early as August," says Tufford.

Tufford adds thanks to the Community Revitalization levy covering costs, they'll recover all the money they're putting in.

"The taxes will all be from the new development, but generally when you tax someone a certain percentage of that there will be so many mills for municipal assessment and so many mills for education, and the total mill rate will go against repaying that debt before we share that. It may take a few years for the RM to recover the funds, but it will all come."