State of the City 2022: Roads Infrastructure

The state of the  city's roads infrastructure, it's a topic that is often among the first to make for a lively discussion in Prince Rupert, with potholes, slalom moguls, patch paving, marking lines and any other item of note from a transit making for the current of conversation.

The financial limitations that the City faces for all of its infrastructure was reviewed as part of our Overview of the mayor's presentation.

Tuesday's State of the City found the Mayor sharing some thoughts on a challenging situation for roads that seems destined to be a conversation starter long after he steps aside from office this fall.

"So let's talk about roads for a second. 

Our roads situation is wonderful ... that's my joke for the evening.

They're not good, the roads were not built correctly actually. They were built with McNickel Creek fill across the harbour that has high salt content and corrodes the pipes, that's why we have ski slopes in the town.

We have whole neighbourhoods that were built on hog fuel that are sinking into the ground and we know a lot of those neighbourhoods that are having major issues.

We just had McBride a hundred and two year old pipe just collapsed on us and we ended up having to rip up the entire road to make sure we just got it done when we got it, when you're ripping up a road there's nothing that's frustrating more than ripping it up the same road twice.

So we said, look let's get it all done and you that cost one million dollars"

When it comes to addressing the roads and situations such as the McBride one, the Mayor noted of their use of a short term loan and the Financial instrument of Legacy Corporation towards the issues.

 "That's just a million dollars out of nothing we have to take a short term borrowing, 850,000 dollars which we're going to pay through Legacy, which I'll get into Legacy later and hopefully that doesn't get onto the taxpayer"

The larger roads replacement program also was part of the night's narrative for the Mayor.

"The truth is that it's one million dollars for every hundred metre of road and we can't just pave the roads anymore. In fact, the roads are now a capital issue.

Every road in town has to be ripped up from scratch, has to be complete new sub-strata all the pipes and servicing and utilities have to be completely replaced underneath. 

And it has to all be redone from scratch.

Paving is basically useless at this point, it's just patch work and right now we've managed to double the roads budget to a million a year.  But the roads budget needs to be getting to six to eight million a year minimum to keep a basic maintenance.

The truth is we need at least ninety million dollar injection right now to get the roads to a baseline standard and then you need to pump another  six to eight million a year into the roads to make sure that the roads can be maintained.

We aren't even close  to doing that. This is something we have to do on our own, unless we can tie it into waste treatment and do piping work with grants and we rip up the roads to replace pipes we might be able to do some of that"

To highlight the challenge of the roads, the Mayor made note of a few troublesome areas of the city and. how its larger than just a planning or a budgeting issue.

"I'll give you an example, Overlook Street. 

Overlook Street alone is a ten million dollar rebuild, there's no point in paving that road  it needs to be completely redone, ten million dollars  ... Crestview that's another road, that area all hog fuel same issue, millions of dollars. 

People say to me, when you gonna do that road? 

Well that's not going to be part of the paving budget, I'm sorry, but it's just not.

We need to raise the capital to do that, the truth is like I said, we need ninety million at least to do some big projects for the roads.

So that's just something I think the community needs to hear, this isn't a bad planning thing from the city, this isn't a budgeting issue from the city. 

This is just what it is, and that's going to be probably one biggest challenges moving forward  is raising that kind of capital without burdening the tax payer.

And we'll show you how we've been creative by doing huge projects and saving the taxpayers from the burden, but roads huge issue"

The Conversation on the roads elements of the presentation can be viewed from the City's Video replay of the Sate of the City Presentation.

The review of the roads notes start at the 11  minute mark

Some of our past items of note on roads can be found from our Operations Archive and our Major Project articles.

Our Full overview of the State of the City Presentation can be reviewed here.

We also have created an archive of the elements from it, that compilation is available here.

( some of the above images come from screenshots of the video presentation)