Thursday, February 27, 2020

Road Remediation Requirements make for part of Budget Preview Notes from Monday

Prince Rupert's roads will see some attention from the City in 2020


The horrid state of much of the city's road infrastructure has seemingly made it to the do list for the City of Prince Rupert, with a one million dollar roads program included as part of Monday's Budget Preview presentation.

The good news for those suffering the bone jarring ride along on many of our city streets was delivered by the City's Chief Financial Office as part of her Monday night notes.

"The recommendation to increase the roads paving by double this year, versus last year  Taking the paving budget from $400,000 a few years ago to one million this year. Which is an increase of 100 percent in two years"





Following the CFO's presentation of Monday night, Mayor Brain and Councillor Cunningham made a few pre-paving observations for the plan for 2020.

"We sitting on Council really appreciate what you have done, it makes our job a lot easier, we can walk down the street now ... on the newly paved roads that are coming"

The paving promise can be reviewed from our notes from the Monday budget preview here.

The good news was also shared by Mayor Lee Brain through his Facebook portal immediately following Monday's one hour and a bit Council meeting.



And those concerns of the public on the state of the roads were clearly quite true, not only for the city's Council members, but for the Mayor himself.

With the growing anger over the state of the city's roads even intruding on the normally very positive vibes relayed through his own social media pulpit.

The indication that the 2020 funding will be significantly larger than from years past does however leave one to wonder of the success of the 2019 roads program.

An initiative that at one  point had reportedly also been topped up to the one million dollar mark.

And a plan that like this year, was at the time greeted very positively by City Council last year.

"People do want to see better roads, I feel that this has kind of been take care of now with the additional $500,000 of the gas tax, which will now put us at a 1 million dollar paving budget for the year, which is 600,000 dollars more than it has been for the last 20 years." -- Councillor Wade Niesh on the City's paving plans for 2019

Though last year's paving program seems to have come with only a few results found around the city, with much of the work seemingly for the benefit of travellers along the Airport Road on Digby Island and those making the transit along Wantage Road to the City's Public Works yard.

Considering how the city likes to compile achievement lists for their followers on the range of Facebook forums that they host. Perhaps offering up a comprehensive review of all the past work for the public to check out might be a welcome addition to the information flow.

That bit of info sharing which perhaps could even posted to the city website, could list which roads have been paved over these last six years and looking to the future, where the latest round of funding will be allocated.

Such an archive might make for a helpful guide for residents when it comes to charting progress on the road infrastructure around the city.

For now you can review the state of the city's infrastructure over the last few years through our archive page here.

More items of interest related to City Council Discussions can also be found from our Council Discussion archive.

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