Sudbury to spend additional $9.8M on road repairs and maintenance

The City of Greater Sudbury will spend an additional $10 million on fixing its crumbling roads.

At the Finance and Administration Committee meeting on Tuesday, Mayor Brian Bigger tabled the motion to spend the money on road repairs.

The funding comes from the federal government, which doubled the gas tax revenue to municipalities in Canada in the federal budget for 2019. It is a one time additional investment of $9.8 million for the City of Greater Sudbury.

Mayor Brian Bigger says the city has heard the people and it is very apparent that the city needs to make a strong effort in improving the condition of the roads. He says this funding will not go towards the construction of new roads, only the repairs and maintenance of current roads within the municipality.

The city had already allocated $3.9 million towards repairs and maintenance of arterial roads - which will deal with large sections of problem areas. This funding would be on top of that, bringing the total to nearly $14 million for road repairs this year.

"The expectation here is that we will be able to go deeper than just fixing arterial roads, there are some local roads and roads throughout the entire municipality that are in need of repair," said Bigger.

On Monday, Ward 2 Councillor Michael Vagnini held a town hall for residents focused on the condition of roads. About 100 people were in attendance and many said they would like to see the city doing something more to improve the roads and better repair potholes.

Bigger says this funding is also an opportunity to look into different options for repairs.

"I believe there's an expectation to be innovative in this repair and maintenance process, that we do consider new types of equipment to conduct those repairs, new materials, new methods," Bigger said.

"The clear direction is we don't want to do exactly what we've always been doing, we want to improve our processes and we have a significant opportunity here to have some very good progress on the maintenance and repair of our road networks."

Ward 9 Councillor Deb McIntosh agreed with the motion, saying the city is responding to all the calls and the emails from residents concerned about the roads.

"This is a very proactive move," said McIntosh.

The motion was passed by the committee. 

However, Ward 5 Councillor Robert Kirwan said the focus of this funding should also be for repairs of the arterial roads.

"I would like to see the arterial roads become the priority ones cause those are the ones that people are driving on at higher speeds," he said. 

He says there are many roads in his ward alone that could use the entire $9 million to repair them. Kirwan says they should focus first on repairing the arterial roads that everyone drives on often before starting to repair local roads.

City staff will come back to council by May 2019 with a list of additional road repair projects that can be completed with the additional funds.