WESTLOCK – While the contractor tasked with the $1.4-million project to upgrade the roughly one-kilometre stretch of Highway 44 in front of the Westlock County Industrial Park is hopeful it will be done by month’s end, the municipality’s CAO isn’t entirely sure that’s possible but remains optimistic saying, “they are nearing completion.”
While work has been ongoing since the spring to install new turning lanes, lights, and a service road on the east side of the highway, heavy rains have slowed the project.
CAO Tony Kulbisky said the feedback he’s gotten from park tenants is that they “understand the short-term pain for long-term improvement” and that “everyone is managing the best they can.” And while he’s hopeful the project will be done soon, he knows that with “Alberta weather we could get three days of rain and then that puts everything off by another week.”
“This intersection is the priority (for the contractor) and they need to get it done as quickly as they can. The engineers I’ve spoken to said it looked like they’d have it completed by the end of next weekend and I guess we’ll wait and see. I mean I hope so,” said Kulbisky in a July 14 interview. “They’ve got a lot of groundwork to make up for as it didn’t help when we had that deluge of rain over those few weeks. But I’m really looking forward to it being done because it’s going to make a lot of things happen very quickly at the park.”
In a July 12 e-mail, Alberta Transportation and Economic Corridors press secretary Jesse Furber said the scope of the Highway 44 work, including the industrial park, includes grading, granular-base course, cold milling, asphalt-concrete pavement, new street lights, and a bridge culvert extension four kilometres south of the Town of Westlock.
Multiple intersection improvements at Township Roads 540, 571, and 594 and the junction of Highway 37 and Highway 779 are also planned with all the work slated to be finished by July 15, 2024. Specifically, the new passing lanes on Highway 44 are located at: kilometre 4.175 to 6.34 (southbound passing lane); kilometre 6.949 to nine (northbound passing lane); kilometre 17.16 to 19.560 (northbound passing lane) and kilometre 56.718 to 59.1 (southbound passing lane).
The background
At their Nov. 22, 2022, governance and priorities meeting and then again at their Nov. 29, 2022, regular meeting, county councillors went behind closed doors to discuss “Westlock Industrial Park Middle Access Intersection” and then voted unanimously to direct Kulbisky to sign an agreement with Alberta Transportation to commit a little over $700,000 in municipal funding to allow the province to tender the $1.4 million project.
According to previous plans, which Kulbisky confirmed are being used, the northern and southern park exits on the west side of the highway will be closed, while the second entrance will remain open, and new lights will be added. Exit and entrance lanes will also be added, while highway access to the cemetery, as well as many of the east-side exit points, will be shuttered and a service road will be added.
While the estimated project cost in 2021 was $925,000, with the county chipping in $444,000 or roughly 48 per cent via its general operating reserve, Kulbisky said they’ve agreed to spend up to $716,040, although he expected the final figure to come in around $600,000. Alberta Transportation has committed $688,526 to the project and Kulbisky said the county’s share is a little higher due to the installation of the lights and to pay for their portion of the engineering costs.
In the summer of 2018, the province spent $21.5 million repaving 38 kilometres of Highway 44 up to Township Road 594, while work in front of the industrial park and throughout the town was shelved — then-county-CAO Leo Ludwig said at the time that design and property-acquisition issues for the industrial park stretch were still being worked on.
Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock MLA Glenn van Dijken said in a June 15, 2022, interview that when it became evident work on Highway 44 was ending before the industrial park back in 2018, “work started on trying to understand why.”
“To be quite honest the ‘why’ was hinging on the county industrial park and trying to negotiate an agreement with the county on how to properly handle the entrances and the turning lanes and all of that,” van Dijken confirmed in the same June 15 interview.
Past and future Highway 44 work
In October 2022, most of the dilapidated stretch of Highway 44 south from the Highway 18 intersection within the Town of Westlock past the industrial park to just before Township Road 594 received a fresh asphalt overlay as part of “maintenance” work that was intended to tide it over until a slew of major upgrades slated for 2026.
At the time van Dijken characterized the roughly three kilometres worth of work as “a maintenance job until the design work is done on the reconstruction phase” — throughout the spring and early summer 2022, Emcon Services, which is contracted by the province to maintain area highways, patched numerous potholes on Highway 44 and also performed the “maintenance” overlay.
In June 2022, the province committed to a bevy of work to Highways 18 and 44 within the Town of Westlock, including “major upgrades” to the intersection of the two by 2026 as the 2022 Provincial Construction Program includes repaving/reconstruction for Highway 44 (two kilometres south of Highway 18 and five kilometres north of Highway 18) and Highway 18, east and west of Highway 44.
