WESTLOCK — The contractor who will be doing the shoulder pull work on 30 miles of Westlock County roads agreed to add an eight-mile portion to that list, for a cost of about $300,000.
Coun. Fred Slobodian, during a June 23 meeting, suggested that Township Road 630 from Highway 44 to Larkspur Village should be added to the work schedule for 2020.
One section of it, director of infrastructure Al Scott clarified then, was to be proposed for work in 2021.
Slobodian’s request came after several discussions on the benefits of doing shoulder pulls compared to the cost of the work—or the suggestion that perhaps patching other roads might be more of a priority.
Administration’s discovery that $900,000 in Municipal Sustainability Initiative funds hadn’t yet been allocated swayed deputy reeve Brian Coleman—who originally was opposed to shoulder pulls—to agree to them.
Because there’s money for patching also, he said, there’s no reason for shoulder pulls not to go ahead.
Except the recent addition of $300,000 to the $1.1 million project would leave only $600,000 to be added to the patching fund.
From administration’s perspective, interim CAO Rick McDonald says priorities have to be identified clearly and brought to council.
“I've since sat down with our staff and we're working on a list of what we think we need to do as a priority versus what (council) asked us to do,” he said.
“We will come back to council with “Here’s the roads that we think we need to fix.” It won’t be shoulder pulls but, you know, you get these frost heaves and these low-lying areas.”
A project has yet to be put forward—it’ll come up in council’s July 14 meeting—and whatever road fixes the county wants to spend the MSI money on require provincial approval.
Part of the setting of priorities is an asset management course that Scott and one other staff member will be attending—an asset management policy was passed in October 2019.
"Of course, asset management is vital to any organization. Those are our infrastructure, our assets, any organization would require some kind of management system and tool, and that's what we'll get from this training, we'll have some tools and that's how we'll manage our assets. There's software out there and so on,” said McDonald.
But it’s also studies and engineering work that have the potential of pre-identifying where work should be done, when and what type—e.g. the 2018 road study—which might alleviate the back and forth between councillors on what ranks higher on the list of priorities.
The county was also allocated $614,250 June 29 through the Strategic Transportation Infrastructure Fund, to be invested in repairing or rebuilding eight bridges in 2020 and 2021, wrote Adrienne Finnegan, the county’s communications specialist, in an e-mail.
