Ten thousand more square feet of business space will be coming to western Hamilton thanks to a new construction project at Butterfield & Vallis.

Company CEO Spencer Butterfield said they were “reinvesting in Bermuda” with the new building being constructed on Canal Road in Pembroke, directly across from the Bull’s Head Car Park.

“We have a tenant already secured,” he said.

His company was hit hard by the pandemic on the food service division side, and also with supply-chain logistics.

“Everyone is having supply-chain problems,” Mr Butterfield said.

However, he said the new building on Canal Road has nothing to do with the current world health crisis.

“It would have happened regardless,” Mr Butterfield said. “It was in the works before the pandemic. We bought the property years ago, and this particular project, we have been developing as part of a larger programme.”

There are additional buildings that are part of the project but they are not being built right now because of the economy.

Construction started late last summer, and Mr Butterfield said, so far, things are on schedule to finish late this summer.

“We have taken pandemic issues into account,” he said.

Part of the project involved pulling down a hillside on Canal Road estimated to be about 20ft high.

“There were houses on the hillside and we razed those and brought it down to roadside,” he said. “That took a long time.”

Mr Butterfield said pulling down the hillside was in keeping with the Corporation of Hamilton’s development plans.

“They are going to put in a sidewalk on the north side of Canal Road,” he said.

“Bermuda years ago was full of hillsides like that. Being part of the city, it works well to bring that down.”

He said it was a complicated situation because although they had permission to excavate, they did not have permission to process the material on site.

“Our project was not held up due to the material processing but the site took an extended period to clear due to complications the contractor had in acquiring permission to process the material at other sites,” Mr Butterfield said. “We were in the planning stage at that point, so unimpacted by the ‘delay’ in clearing the site.

“There were no safety concerns at our site. There was never permission to process on our site nor was it ever requested.”

And Mr Butterfield said it did not get in the way of the project.