Cranbrook city council is hoping to get some infrastructure funding from the federal government to tackle projects on Victoria Avenue and expand the city’s sidewalk network.
Victoria Avenue is the city’s busiest arterial route that has an original sanitary sewer line that was installed in 1962. That capacity was upgraded in the 1980s to increase the flow, however, the city still uses a small section of the original line between 6th St. North and 21st Ave. South.
In addition to the underlying infrastructure, the road is beginning to fail with recent maintenance work showing the depth of asphalt and base gravel being inadequate.
City staff is hoping the final result ends up with a new sewer main and a property rebuilt road to support current and future growth.
The Victoria Avenue project, we have some potential expansion of the scope of what that project is based on some of the storm sewer analysis that we’ve done,” said Matejka, “but it’d be in the range of $2 million to $3 million.
Mike Matejka, the city’s project manager, noted that if successful, the grants, which would be sourced from the Federal Gas Tax Fund, would full cover both projects.
“If there’s other work that the city would be doing with some of the resurfacing and we we could augment it with our own capital program but we’d be looking to get the whole thing covered.”
The second project that the city will be looking at is expanding the network of sidewalks, as many sections are missing due to the varied historical development process and changing land uses.
As it stands, there are kilometres of roadway throughout the commercial and residential areas of the city without a sidewalk.
“The sidewalks we have up to $1 million in missing links around town. We can probably go higher than that with a lot of smaller areas,” said Matejka.
Adding sidewalks to roadways will help connect pedestrian traffic to parks, recreation, schools and other core community uses, according to a staff report.