Residents of the Brookside Village complex in Barrhead are still waiting for the town to come around and fix the cracked and sinking roadway.
Lawrence Verrault has been living in the complex for years and says the roadway has been in need of repair for close to eight years.
The roadway is half concrete slabs and half asphalt, he said, and both halves are at the point where it’s dangerous to walk on it no matter what the weather.
“It’s always dangerous,” he said. “It freezes in the wintertime with the snow on it, and in the summer you sometimes have to walk on the grass to avoid the puddles.”
There are sections of the concrete that have cracked and resettled, Verrault said, which creates a jagged surface where people could easily catch their toes and trip and fall. It’s something he knows about first-hand.
“I fell once and cracked my thumb on there,” he said.
On the asphalt section, he said there are areas where the asphalt has settled and sunk into the roadbed. This is most noticeable where the sewer drains are located, because they are raised above where the road surface now is.
The whole look of the roadway takes away from the intended aura of the complex, he said.
“It’s not a pretty place,” Verrault said. “Well, it is a pretty place, but that really takes away from it.”
Ultimately, he and his neighbours are asking for is for the town to come and replace the concrete slabs and redo the asphalt section. Patching the roadway wouldn’t be enough, he said, because that’s just a temporary fix.
Mayor Brian Schulz said that while he sympathizes with the Brookside Village residents, the town’s road repair process is based on which roads have more priority.
“There are many other streets that need repairing in town,” he said. “Who has priority?”
He said he and the town are aware of the residents’ concerns, and the Brookside Village roadway is on the town’s list of roads to repair. However, it simply doesn’t rank high enough on the list.
“It will be brought up at this year’s budget retreat and if there’s no higher priority, it will be re-evaluated,” he said, adding that he can’t say for certain when it will be repaired.
The town’s road repair schedule is set around a short- and long-term plan, Schulz said, and is based on information provided by the town’s engineers and road crews. It’s their input that allows the town to decide which roads will be repaired or repaved in a given year and which ones will have to wait.
Some of the criteria used to determine whether a road is a high-priority candidate to be repaired is overall usage and the number of vehicles that travel on the road.
In addition, it depends on the available finances the town has to allocate to road repair, he said. The more money the town has for roadwork, the more roads it can do in a construction season.
Schulz added that he wants the Brookside Village residents to know that their road will be repaired, it just might take a while.
“I understand their concern, and they’re not being forgotten,” he said. “I wish we had the finances to do all the roads.”
