Not enough money to keep roads smooth

If the city wanted to repair just the surface of paved roads it owns — it would cost around $175 million.

Council had asked for a complete report on how many roads the city maintains.  Public works says the city maintains close to 1,000 lane km of roads – that includes paves, gravel and surface treated roads.  Director, Luc Duval says we’re constantly playing catchup with our deteriorating roads and won’t be getting a head anytime soon.

“There a need presently to spend $7 million per year on asphalt, gravel and surface treatment.  The present budget doesn’t have $7 million, it has $2 million.  So we do have an annual shortfall of $5 million”

Duval says when you factor in replacing underground infrastructure like water mains,  they spend around $5.4 million per year.  Still he says it’s nowhere near enough.

” 1,000 km of roads, if we were to rebuild them today have a value – just for the asphalt, gravel and surface treatment would be around $175 million.”

The city Quality Pavement Index (QPI) has also been steadily dropping since 2009.  Duval says an ideal score would be 70 out of 100 but Timmins scores closer to 41 out of 100.  Council has downloaded 1.2 km of lane gravel road and 1.6km of lane paved road since 2007.  But have added 2.2 lane km of asphalt road and have returned 35 km of asphalt road to gravel road.

Public works says to properly have the budget and roads up to standards, property taxes would need to be increased by 7%.