County residents who regularly use Township Road 604 between highways 769 and 33 should prepare for some short-term pain in exchange for long-term gain.
This construction season, the county is starting work on the road in preparation for having it paved by the end of 2014.
“You have to make it worse before you can make it better,” said reeve Bill Lee when talking about how drivers will be inconvenienced before seeing the road dramatically improved.
Part of the reason the road is going to be paved is that it is well used right now, and its current format – an oiled road – is not suited for the traffic it receives, said county CAO Mark Oberg.
“Oiled roads are good until the traffic gets too heavy, heavy as in lots of traffic or else heavy trucks,” he said. “Oiled roads don’t stand up so well and then you have to go to a higher-quality surface.”
Lee added that his knowledge and experience of the road is affected by what he hears about it from county residents.
“It is a road I get a lot of complaints on for dust,” he said. “It’s a well-used road, and if we get it paved it will hold up a lot better.”
Work on the road is expected to be completed in stages. This year and next year, preparation work will be done to establish a solid base for the pavement. In 2014, the actual paving should take place.
“We don’t want to build a road and pave a road at the same time,” Lee said. “You want that road to get conditioned and hardened up for the paving.”
The cost of getting the 12.8-km stretch of road paved is estimated at $4.75 million, Oberg said. The exact cost won’t be known until the project is sent out for tender and bids are received.
The money to pay for the paving will come from the county’s share of the provincial Municipal Sustainability Initiative, he said, specifically the deferred funding from 2011, as well as the funding to come in 2012-2014.
As for the cost of the road preparation, Oberg said the county will cover that itself.
“We’ll be going the groundwork this year just from our own taxes,” he said.
Oberg added that having the MSI funding available was crucial to proposing and completing the paving project.
“As a county, if we didn’t have the money coming in from the province, we wouldn’t be able to afford projects like this,” he said.
When work starts on the road, Lee said county staff plan to start at Highway 769 and head west towards Highway 33.
