Prince Rupert's Black Top Challenges, City Council hears Primer on Paving

Prince Rupert's Roads and what the city has planned towards
rehabilitation of them was one of the key topics from
Monday's City Council Session

For residents of Prince Rupert rattling around on crumbling roads and dodging potholes, there's good news and bad news ahead for 2021.

The Good News, the City has awarded its paving contract for the year ... 

The Bad News, probably by the end of the work sometime in September, there's a good chance many around town are going to be disappointed that their street was passed over again this year.

Monday's City Council session provided for an extensive review of the challenges of road infrastructure for the City, first as we noted yesterday, through the wide ranging discussion on the prospect of introducing a Local improvement Bylaw to tackle neighbourhood projects.

As part of that discussion, City Manager Robert Long explored the idea of Local Improvements, with residents getting together with the City to put the improvements in place on a 50/50 shared cost.

"Many municipalities have something called the Local Improvements and we've talked to council about  this on a number of occasions, where, where the neighbourhood gets together and says I'm sick and tired  of these potholes, lets get together and lets pave the laneway and we'll put it on our taxes, in that location for say twenty years. We'll ask for the municipality to chip in a share, usually that share in most municipalities I've worked in is fifty percent. So the general taxpayer pays for fifty percent of the improvements"

Mayor Brain also noted of the city's efforts to double the paving budget in the last year, though that increase in funding mostly came through the delivery of money by way of the Gas Tax and not any actual commitment from Council to put more money towards the community's growing concerns over the state of the roads.

Those discussion themes were followed by the Awarding of the paving contract for the year to Adventure Paving, with their bid coming in at just under  864,000 dollars.

Through the course of a Report from the City's Operations Director Richard Pucci (which we previewed here) the city's approach towards the paving program was explained.

"The City annually completes paving under the Capital Paving program, the paving undertaken by this program only covers trouble spots throughout the community, it is not a blanket paving program it's more of a skip patching program"

As part of the discussion, Councillor Blair Mirau offered up some praise for the Operations Director's work on the file.

"I always tend to say this to Mr. Pucci, whenever he makes our jobs incredibly easy by presenting you know the lowest and only compliant bid happens to belong to a local contractor, so when those factors come together it's always an easy decision"

Mayor Lee Brain retuned to some themes from the City Manager  from earlier in the night and raised the topic of a larger plan for multi year paving as it was the case in the past.

"My only question would be, Mr. Long brought up the fact that we used to have kind of a list I guess over time, does the Operation Department have kind of a list on multi year plan, or is it mainly health and safety, high priority as they arise areas for now until we can kind of get a more steady paving program going, what's the methodology  I guess you could say right now"

In reply, Mr. Pucci provided the thumbnail sketch as to how his department has handled the paving issues over recent years.

"Unfortunately, we're really only looking one year in advance, we know right now what we're doing for this year, we're scoping out trouble areas for next year, but we can't advance it any further than that. A lot of it depends on where we have major breaks, and other issues; road rehabilitation to try and leverage some of the funds to do these works. And we always  try and spread the paving throughout the community as best we can on the east and west side. And we tried to do it again this year the best we can and we do have a decent spread. But areas just seem to pop up right after winter, around right now and they just show themselves and we have to deal with them 

The Mayor followed up by seeking further background on the difference between the annual  paving program and some wider capital works road work that is needed.

"So some of our roads are actually capital projects then in the end, because there's sub strata issues that are within, depending on certain neighbourhoods how the town was filled back in the day ... so is it not just that we can't just put money yearly into a paving program, that some of it will be actual capital investments, where we actually have to do full rebuilds of certain areas and it's not really worth paving them in some respects, is that correct?"

Towards that observation the Operations Director made note of the financial challenges facing the city and how that impacts on any road remediation projects they may take on. 

"Yeah, that is correct, we have to look at the where the money, there isn't a lot of money as council is aware and the community is aware, so we have to look at where the best place to put that money is. So if we're planning to do a major capital improvement with a road rehabilitation, it's best to save that money and renew a whole street at once ... and then put that capital towards sewer, water, roads, sidewalks curb and gutter and get a whole new infrastructure out of it that will last a lot longer. You know, no one likes  to see fresh asphalt cut up because we have a water leak directly underneath it. That's not what we want to do that's not what we intend to do, but unfortunately it sometimes happened with the state of our infrastructure."

Council's work on developing an Asset Management plan to save for such infrastructure work also made for part of the overview on the city's ongoing challenges.

Mr. Puccired shared his enthusiasm for that approach, observing that they have a couple of areas of the city they are planning to address with extensive work over the course of several years.

"We have a couple of areas of town where we  planning to do capital improvements through major road rehabilitation over several years and those areas, it wouldn't be a good to invest in a little bit of asphalt right now it's better to wait and raise the funds to do a major capital improvement. 

Councillor Cunningham raised the topic of last years paving and the need for some warranty work, something which the Operations Director noted would be addressed by the contract who is currently working in a neighbouring community and will come into Prince Rupert to address the concerns.

The overview of the challenges of a crumbing infrastructure was a helpful guide to what the city is up against, but one area which was not discussed was how City Council prioritizes its overall spending on a year to year basis.

With Council having focused much of their attention on a range of other projects, initiatives and vision planning exercises over the last seven year; while the roads apparently continue to be put on the back burner and a topic that only seems to capture more attention during the annual road paving announcement. 

You can review the full presentation from the City's Video Archive starting at the one hour twenty six minute mark.

More notes on Monday's Council session can be explored from our Council Timeline.

A wider overview of past Council themes is available here.

While some of the past infrastructure notes can be reviewed here.