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Will your street get resurfaced this year? Here's the work plan

Grovesnor Avenue and Allen’s Side Road are on the resurfacing list
PH-Pothole
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Sault Ste. Marie City Council is expected to approve $2 million worth of road resurfacing work at its meeting tonight.

"The city has many surface-treated roads that would perform better with an asphalt surface," Don Elliott, the city's director of engineering, says in a report to Mayor Christian Provenzano and city councillors.

"Surface treatment is a comparably inexpensive method of providing a hard surface on low-volume roadways," Elliott says.

"It does not perform well on higher volume roads, or bus routes. For several years, some of the surface treatment allocation has been used to convert Class C [surface-treated] roads that are bus routes to Class B [asphalt-treated roads with roadside ditches] to improve longevity."

"Rising construction costs are slowly eroding the effectiveness of the program, especially when the budget has not been increased in decades. Several arterial and collector roads are in need of new surfaces, thereby requiring that a portion of the capital roads budget be redirected to resurfacing, which only defers capital road reconstruction," Elliott says.

Here's the proposed 2019 road-work plan:

Class A: Asphalt roads with curbs and storm sewers

  • Grosvenor Avenue – Bruce Street to Trelawne Avenue: resurfacing
  • (note that two other streets will be resurfaced under the capital roads plan: Bay Street from Gore to Pim, and St. Georges/McNabb between Grand Boulevard and Pim Street)

Class B: Asphalt roads with roadside ditches

  • Allen’s Side Road – Second Line to Base Line: resurfacing
  • Ransome Drive – Rosita Street to Allen’s Side Road: conversion from class C to class B, bus route
  • Ellis Road – Nixon Road to Rosita Street: conversion from class C to class B surface, bus route
  • Nixon Road – Ellis Road to Second Line: conversion from class C to class B surface, bus route

Class C: Surface-treated roads

  • North Eden – Second Line to Eden Square
  • Roosevelt Avenue – North Eden to south limit
  • Cameron Avenue – Wawanosh Avenue to McNabb Street
  • Blake Avenue – Champlain Street to McNabb Stree
  • a quantity of crack sealing and full lane patches may be included in the tender, budget permitting.

Councillors will also be asked to award an $8.3 million tender to Avery Construction to rebuild the large concrete box storm sewer from John Street to the north side of Albert Street West.

Most of the work will involve installing a new precast concrete arch inside the existing sewer along the laneway between Brown Street and John Street.

This part of the Fort Creek aqueduct reconstruction is expected to take two years to complete.

The city's Black Road widening project isn't expected to proceed this year because the Ontario government has so far not announced collecting link funding, so $1.2 million will be reassigned from the Black Road work to rebuild the aqueduct.

Another $1.6 million contract for reconstruction of Leo Avenue from Queen Street East to Victoria Avenue is expected to be awarded to low bidder Boyer Construction.

That capital project will close that part of Leo Avenue from May 30 to Oct. 31.

As for future work, councillors will be asked tonight to designate the reconstruction of Third Line between Black Road and the Sault Area Hospital entrance as the city's candidate for funding for rural and northern communities under the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program.

The Third Line project, tentatively scheduled for 2020, is estimated to cost between $5 million and $6 million in city capital funding.

If the application is successful, the capital funds could be redirected to the planned 2020 Queen Street revitalization project.

Tonight's City Council meeting will be livestreamed on SooToday starting at 4:30 p.m.


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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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