The municipality has three valid petitions from neighbourhoods willing to pay to have their alleyways paved.
The most recent was submitted this month, while the rest are from as far back as three or four years ago. Each neighbourhood is now waiting for the municipality to put its alleyway in the capital budget for underground utility upgrades.
Once those upgrades are completed鈥攚ith funds from the utilities reserve鈥攖hen the alley can be paved, at the cost of the homeowners who back onto it.
In order for a petition to be valid, at least two thirds of the homeowners affected, making up at least 50 per cent of the assessed property value, have to be in favour of the local improvement project.
The municipality passed a residential laneway paving bylaw in 2005 to make such petitions possible.
During the Aug. 20 council meeting, Infrastructure Manager Don Pickle explained that just because a petition is valid doesn鈥檛 mean the work will be completed quickly.
For the work to get done, first the municipality needs to hire an engineer to assess the existing infrastructure, said Christine Nadon, manager of communications and IT.
鈥淲e can鈥檛 budget for something that we don鈥檛 know what it鈥檚 going to cost.
鈥淪o the next step in the process is we need to hire an engineering firm that will come and have a look at the alleys and make an assessment of the infrastructure that鈥檚 down there and provide cost estimates and from there we can budget.鈥�
That assessment will also determine what alleyway is in the greatest need of infrastructure upgrades, helping the municipality to prioritize the work.
鈥淲e have to know, are there areas worse than others and will they cause issues before others and is there an operational imperative that we make the executive decision to fix one area before another?鈥�
Currently, part of the delay in getting the work done is that the municipality doesn鈥檛 have a Director of Operations, so there isn鈥檛 a person in the position to hire an engineer and to lead the project to completion. Interviews and reference checks for that position were done last week.
Nadon said the municipality doesn鈥檛 yet know when an engineer will be hired to do the work.
Nicole Veerman
[email protected]
