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City Council approves construction of new access road to the P-patch

Neighbours won't have to pay the $14,736 share they would otherwise have been saddled with had the city built the new road as a local improvement
NorthernAvePatch
New access road (shown in black) will provide access to the P-Patch to and from Northern Ave

P-patch residents will be getting a new access road into their pleasing precinct, even if some people living proximate to the new Passchendaele Lane petitioned against it.

City councillors voted unanimously Monday against postponing the project until 2024.

Instead, they agreed with Ward 3 Coun. Matthew Shoemaker to proceed with the Passchendaele project this year, with the full half-million-dollar construction cost to be paid from the city's capital budget.

That means neighbours won't have to pay the $14,736 share they would otherwise have been saddled with had the city built the new road as a local improvement.

"While I would agree that this might be seen as a bad precedent to set," Shoemaker said, "there's a difference between this petition and local improvements in general."

"The difference is that, in this case, the road doesn't exist. It is being built as a result of an environmental assessment which has determined this is a fix to a problem on Pine Street, and a more general problem of access to the P-patch off Pine Street."

"This fix has been investigated along with putting lights at the corner of Pine and Pleasant, along with extending Northern Avenue all the way to Black Road, along with a couple of other iterations that were checked out through the environmental assessment process that began in 2015, so we're now seven years beyond when it began."

"And now this is about to be implemented and for $14,000 there's the potential we're going to set a fix back two years.... I think that's too long of a time frame," Shoemaker said.

"We have the opportunity to either spend $486,000 or $500,000 on the road. And I don't think there's much difference, one way or another."

The new route will go from Northern Avenue to Princeton, through Panoramic Drive.

It was approved in 2017 to reduce delays for westbound traffic making left turns at Pine Street and Pleasant Drive.


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David Helwig

About the Author: David Helwig

David Helwig's journalism career spans seven decades beginning in the 1960s. His work has been recognized with national and international awards.
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