Some Thunder Bay gravel roads to get chip-sealed, council decides

Superior Morning3:47Chip Sealing Roads

City councillors agreed last night to start to chip-seal some rural roads. Trevor Giertuga is a councillor who's been pleading for pavement for fifteen years.City councillors in Thunder Bay voted Monday night to consider hard-surfacing rural roads as part of next year's budget.

Councillor Trevor Giertuga, who has been pushing this issue for the last 15 years, said it's about time the city pay attention to rural roads.

"We've done a great job with our enhanced infrastructure, but we've left out our gravel roads," he said.

"And, I'm not saying to do it all at once. Put forth a percentage of our budget to getting these done."

Staff will decide what roads get priority for chip-sealing.

"I want administration to make that determination of what is best, because it has to be based on what type of road base is there, the traffic volumes, the daily average traffic volumes, and drainage concerns," Giertuga said.

"Some of the gravel roads won't be able to be hard surfaced at all."

Giertuga noted gravel roads also present a safety issue. At one time many gravel roads originally had only a small number of homes. Now some roads have 50 homes on them. Gravel is hard on cars, and they're very difficult to walk on, with stones flying and dust.

He also noted there were lots of dust issues this spring on a number of rural roads in the McIntyre area.

Mayor Keith Hobbs mentioned he didn't see any gravel roads in the Niagara region when he was there for AMO conference.

It's "time to bring these roads into the 21st century," he said.

The city will allocate $150,000 of the 2016 roads budget to begin chip-sealing gravel roads.

The city has about 92 kilometres of gravel roads, mostly in the McIntyre and Neebing wards.