Council has approved a motion to create engineering standards for gravel roads and parking lots, to the tune of $65,000 funded from the stabilization reserve, following a motion from Coun. Sheena Hughes during the June 3 meeting.
Hughes told councillors on Tuesday that she submitted the motion because engineering standards for the city's 16 gravel parking lots "fell through the cracks."
"This came on because we were having discussions about paving Lacombe Lake parking lot and then what we realized was that there weren't actual standards for triggers of when it needs to be reevaluated for repaving or upgrading for that parking lot," Hughes said.
Hughes submitted an information request (IR) on May 6, inquiring how much it would cost to reconstruct the current gravel parking lots for both Lacombe Lake Park and Botanical Park.
The city's response said that "these gravel structures are not currently part of asset management plans performed by engineering, and as such there is no direct information to help develop strong cost estimates."
They found that it would cost approximately $1.7 million to reconstruct the Lacombe Lake Park parking lot, versus a little over $2 million to perform the base repair with further investment in paving, curb, gutter, and storm work.
City staff told council that although there are currently no official standards for when work needs to be done on the gravel lots, they are assessed and gone over with a grader — a tool which scrapes up packed gravel and levels out areas that would become potholes — on a regular basis. Lacombe Lake parking lot is done every 10 days, while gravel roads in the newly annexed areas are graded weekly.
"This is something that I think is an asset that is being used by both our staff and by public in various parking lots and various roads and needs to be done," Hughes said. She added that with the annexation of lands from Sturgeon County, they acquired many more kilometres of gravel roads that the city is responsible to service and maintain.
"In many ways this is a no-brainer to me," she said. "Considering we have every other asset, we have service levels down to the hours of service for every single thing we have, and we have assets managed for every single other item that I'm aware of, gravel parking lots and roads need to be included in that."
Coun. Mike Killick was the only councillor who voted in opposition to the motion. He told the Gazette there were a number of reasons that went into his vote.
"Fundamentally I think we started out by saying we have 16 parking lots that are unpaved, and how would we prioritize them to get them paved? And I'm a firm believer that we need to finish these projects," Killick said. "We started off with parking lots, and now all of a sudden we expanded it significantly to include parking lots and roads."
He added that he hasn't received complaints from residents regarding the state of the city's gravel roads.
"We're going to have an engineering report that tells us some things that we're already doing and addressing on an ad hoc basis. We already grade Lacombe [Lake Park] on an as needed basis," he said. "It expanded way beyond what the original intent was. And we're already doing the work in any case."
