City of Prince Rupert to dedicate $850,000 towards Paving plans for 2020

2020 could see more road closures as the city prepares
to tackle a number of paving projects for the year ahead

Residents of Prince Rupert may find some of the trouble spots on their personal list of city streets get some long overdue attention in 2020, that as the City of Prince Rupert outlined an increase towards road remediation for the year ahead.

The paving promise coming as part of Monday's city council session which found the City's Financial Officer Corrine Bomben making note of 850,000 dollars in civic spending ahead to address some of the road concerns, which will be an increase of 350,000 from the level allocated for 2019.

The spending will come as part of the larger Capital project overview of Monday, which provided for the blue print ahead for a number of major initiatives in 2020, as well as an outline as to how the city hopes to fund the majority of them, with a hope that they won't have to go to the taxpayer for any debt requirements that many come along.

Councillor Barry Cunningham was inquiring on paving plans for the year
ahead as part of Monday's Council Session

As for the paving theme, Ms. Bomben's notes found approval from Councillor Barry Cunningham, who would like to see even more money allocated if the city could find grants or other funding towards remediation on the city's streets.

 'With the paving increase, I know that the Federal government has been talking a lot about infrastructure grants and that. Our road infrastructure is very poor right now, and I'm wondering if there's any grants going to be available to increase, double, triple, quadruple our paving contribution" -- Councillor Barry Cunningham on funding for road projects in the city

Mr. Cunningham's dreams of grant funding would however be dashed by Ms. Bomben who noted that at the moment there are no funding instruments available for such a program.

What may be instructive for the city's residents in the New Year, would be for council to review the paving program from this past year, which had allocated one million dollars following receipt of some additional Federal Gas Tax money towards the road.

However seemingly the most of it was gobbled up this summer by some major work done on George Hills, Way, McBride Street, the Digby Island Airport road and on Wantage Road leading to the city public works yard.

The paving program for 2019 appearing to have left number of roads in the city still making for somewhat of an off road challenge for motorists, who may have just abandoned any thoughts of ever getting a wheel alignment ever again.

Council might wish to take some time in a public session to invite the City Manager to review the results of the paving plan from 20119 and perhaps offer up an idea as to where the city plans to address their attention for the year ahead.

For more notes on Monday's Council session see our Council Timeline Feature here, while the discussion of the theme of the roads can be viewed from the City's Video Archive starting at the 24 minute mark.



For some background on the city's infrastructure challenges, see our archive page here.

A wider overview of Council Discussion themes can be found from our Council Discussion archive here.

Cross posted from the North Coast Review.