County council was skeptical this week about plans to spend $29 million to realign Starkey Road – especially since they included an underpass for moose.
Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to spend $500,000 to do detailed engineering studies for the first phase of the realignment of Starkey Road. Mayor Don Rigney and councillors Don McGeachy and David Kluthe were not present.
Starkey Road is a two-lane collector (one lane each way) near the Sturgeon Valley Golf & Country Club that runs north from the Sturgeon River to Highway 37. It’s one of the region’s main routes to that highway.
The road is not built to support the traffic on it and needs frequent repairs, said Coun. Tom Flynn in an interview. There have also been numerous accidents where it meets Highway 37 (the intersection has poor sight-lines), some of them fatal. Last year, council asked ISL Engineering and Land Services to come up with some solutions.
Traffic volume at the Highway 37 and Starkey intersection is set to triple to 3,000 cars a day by 2032 due to planned growth in the valley, said Shelly Moulds, project manager with ISL, speaking before council. A survey at an open house on Starkey held by ISL last November found that 56 per cent of attendees favoured the road’s realignment.
Moulds recommended that the county upgrade Starkey to a fully-paved collector with a 40-metre right-of-way. This would include drainage ditches on either side and a three-metre wide paved multi-use trail. It would also involve widening the bridge over the Sturgeon River.
Instead of heading north from the Sturgeon to Highway 37, the new Starkey would make a dogleg to the west just north of the future Windsor Estates subdivision and merge with Range Road 252, meeting the highway about half a section west of where it does now. The province plans to put a new interchange at Range Road 252 and Highway 37 at some point in the future, Moulds noted.
Highway access from the old Starkey would be closed, with the old road converted into a local gravel road. The realignment would also affect Coal Mine Road and add turn bays and signal lights to several intersections.
The realignment would cost about $29 million, Moulds said. Phase one, which includes everything between the Sturgeon and Estate Way, would cost about $8.8 million.
Councillors Flynn and Karen Shaw proposed a cheaper option, one that would keep Starkey where it is and use a service road to hook it to the new Highway 37 interchange.
But if the valley is set to grow like the county’s plans suggest, it will need all the road access it can get, said ISL’s Hassan Shaheen.
“If you’re going to pursue growth … you’re going to need something more robust than a service road,” he said. “If you’re going to maintain the current access (route), you’re just going to put more people at risk.”
Shaw questioned the need to put a $400,000 wildlife passage under the Sturgeon River bridge to help moose, frogs and other animals cross the road.
“Unless you’re going to fence the entire area, there’s no guarantee (the animals) are going to use it,” she said.
While she hadn’t spoken with local animals about the underpass, Moulds said that best environmental practices recommended that one be included in the realignment.
The $500,000 for the first phase of the realignment will come from Sturgeon Valley off-site levies, reads a report to council.
Work on phase one is set to start next year. Phase two was about 20 years away, councillors told the Gazette, and depended on construction of the new interchange at Highway 37 and Range Road 252.
