The City of Grande Prairie is anticipating a fairly busy spring and summer road construction season after a winter with low snowfall. Transportation Manager Robert Carroll says that while there will be delays for traffic, it’s a net positive for the community.
“From what I heard it’s going to be our largest capital season ever,” he says. “So be prepared for construction slowdowns and that type of thing, but it’s good. It’s nice to see this big investment in our roads from our city.”
Carroll says while anything is possible when it comes to weather in the city, at this point they’ve seen lower than average snowfall levels than they anticipated over the past several months.
“Being around the city for 15 winters, this is probably the low average for snowfall and the amount of time we had to put into it,” he says. “Our full [snow removal] crews this year worked what might have been two [weekends] but it may have been one and a half.”
Carroll says, in addition to a milder winter, they were also able to tap into city resources previously unavailable to them.
“We’ve made a bit of a change with our structure with the transportation department in the last couple of years, and we’ve kind of merged transportation and parks together,” he says. “That gave us a bit of [an] opportunity to tap into some other people who may not have been involved in snow removal in previous years.”
Some of the projects that will make up some of the 2021 construction season include the fourth phase of the downtown rehabilitation project on 100 Avenue, between 98 Street and 100 Street, as well as the finishing work on the sanitary sewer diversion on 84 Avenue between 113 Street and 116 Street.