Nova Scotia doubles budget for improving rural and gravel roads

Nova Scotians can expect to see about as much road work this year as last year, unless they travel in rural parts of the province or they use gravel roads.

In the province's five-year highway improvement plan released Tuesday, the budgets for both rural roads and gravel roads are double what they were in 2021-2022.

Gravel roads will get $40 million worth of work this coming fiscal year. The Houston government has increased the budget for roads covered by the rural impact mitigation program from $11 million to $22 million for 2022-2023.

During the last election the PCs promised to beef up spending on rural roads and those made of gravel.

All told, the plan calls for roughly $500 million to be spent on repairing or building highways, bridges and roads over the next 12 months. That's about $30 million less than this past year.

The province will pay for most of the work, but it will be getting money from Ottawa for larger, cost-shared highway projects, and from municipalities on smaller, local road improvements.

It is budgeting $78.1 million in federal funding for the coming fiscal year and $5.4 million from municipalities, according to Public Works spokesperson Brett Loney.

Loney said the province got $130.6 million in cost-sharing last year: $129.6 million from the federal government and $1 million from municipalities.

Nova Scotia Public Works Minister Kim Masland told reporters the plan includes a mix of repair jobs and new construction.

"It's the balance of making sure that we're doing the proper maintenance for the roads that we have, which is a lot," said Masland. "I mean, 25,000 kilometres of roadway is a significant amount of maintenance, but we also need to balance it to make sure we're investing in infrastructure that's going to support the increase of people living in our province."

Brand new projects won't be announced until the government is ready to release its overall capital spending plans around budget time this spring.