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Cranbrook’s pothole budget already bottomed out

Council may be asked to increase budget to ease rocky roads

The city’s pothole budget is bottoming out, with only $9,733 remaining out of the $123,000 total for the year.

Cranbrook Public Works will be utilizing the remaining funds primarily for pothole patching, but as that will only tackle some of the city’s road concerns, city staff may request additional funds.

CAO Wayne Staudt noted at the July 14 council meeting that city staff was quite aware of the pothole issues around town.

“I don’t call them potholes anymore, I think if we were only dealing with potholes we could manage it, but we’re dealing with potholes that are the size of this room today,” Staudt said, referring to the council chambers. “At this time of the year we’ve already used it all up. So we might be coming back to council as we go on here requesting some additional money for some of these potholes.”

Coun. Sharon Cross asked where the extra funds for pothole fixing would come from.

Staudt said it would likely come from the Accumulative Surplus at this point.

“I know we struggle with ‘should we spend all this accumulative surplus and surplus that we gain in a year?’” he said.

“It’s important to hang on to that so that we have some money available to address these very important issues that we can’t see in February when we’re dealing with the budget. Here we are in July and we see these kinds of problems.”

He noted that there is another problem near 4th Street and 15th Avenue where the creek has washed out part of the road.

“It’s basically collapsed and it’s going to be a fairly big expenditure that we didn’t see coming at us,” he said, “and all the issues we’ve been dealing with at Elizabeth Lake that we didn’t see coming at us when we finalized our budget in February.”

He said it is tempting to spend at budget time, but that’s why they have it.