The plight of landowners in remote areas made all the more remote by the elements needs to be heard and addressed.
The spring season has not been kind to many Athabasca County roads, with frost boils and rain rendering many dirt roads impossible to traverse without risking severe vehicle damage. Residents are expressing anger at the poor road conditions, in some cases with the only road to access to their home.
The nature of the damage makes it take to time to really address, and more permanent solutions are costly for any government to bear. But there needs to be permanent solutions for these roads, especially to address emergency access concerns.
In some remote areas of Athabasca County and beyond, there are residents who have limited road access to their homes. When weather leaves these roads impassable, residents often bring up the concern of emergency vehicles either being very delayed or outright unable to reach these far-flung areas.
That is not a concern government bodies and emergency services can ignore. There is a responsibility for them to ensure emergency services can have stable access to every home within their jurisdiction, allowing for later response times due to distance. Leaving key emergency access points to these homes unaddressed should not really be acceptable.
There is not unnecessarily an easy solution, however. Municipal governments are often pressed in their budgets and to a bureaucracy, spending money and resources for more substantial work on relatively sparsely used roads does not necessarily make fiscal sense. Particularly in rural areas, the challenge can be difficult considering the many kilometres of road a county has to deal with.
This may be case where upper government intervention is necessary. With the additional resources the province has to bear, some kind of initiative or program to address key access roads in rural areas might be more appropriate at a provincial level rather than a municipal one.
This is a difficult question for governments to weigh but it is the type of problem that gets swept away far too often. Long-term planning and intergovernmental relations are needed to find a steady solution. Hopefully, it does not take a worst-case scenario to find that solution.
