Spruce and Pine avenues will be closed for much of the summer, while the municipality replaces water and sewer lines on the 800 block of Connaught Drive, in preparation for paving its alleyway.
Pine is scheduled to be closed for six to eight weeks, with intermittent openings, when equipment isn’t in use in the area. When open, there will be a reduced speed limit of 30 km/h.
Spruce is the staging area for the entire project, so it will have a full closure until October.
“The road closures are an inconvenience,” conceded Bruce Thompson, director of operations for the municipality. “We’re aware of the impact they have and we’ll be doing everything we can to minimize the disruption.”
That includes accommodating traffic on Pine when it’s feasible to do so.
The 800 block of Connaught has been on the municipality’s to-do list for a number of years, but only made it in the capital budget for utility upgrades this year.
The push for the project is that the residents who back onto the alley have signed a petition, agreeing to a local improvement tax to cover the paving costs.
“But,” said Thompson, “before we pave the lane and put an expensive surface on top of it, we want to make sure the utilities below are in good shape, so what we’re doing is replacing the utilities, so that they’ll last for decades to come.”
The sewer line has already been completed, leaving the waterlines, paving and concrete work to be completed in the weeks to come.
To do the waterlines, Thompson said instead of digging up the entire alleyway, the contractors are digging a hole on either side, one on Pine and one on Spruce, and feeding new lines through the existing ones.
“It’s called pipe splitting,” he said. “It’s like when you’re running conduit through a building and then you fish the wires through—you use the old pipe as a conduit.”
He said this approach is more efficient and less intrusive.
The municipality has more valid petitions on file for other neighbourhoods willing to pay for the paving of their alleyways, and each one is just waiting until it is selected as a project in the capital budget.
In order for a petition to be valid, at least two thirds of the homeowners affected—making up at least 50 per cent of the assessed property value—have to be in favour of the local improvement project.
The municipality passed a residential laneway paving bylaw in 2005 to make such petitions possible.
Nicole Veerman
[email protected]
