The City of Edmonton has chosen to take an aggressive approach to fix the city’s dilapidated alleyways.
City council voted in favour of spending between $20 million and $22 million per year over the next 25 years on the Alley Renewal Program, which aims to get back alleys to the desired standard within the next quarter century.
This was the more expensive of two options presented to the city. The cheaper option would see the city spend $18.4 million annually.
“We will go with a faster-pace option in order to attack the problem and bring down the F condition faster and council asked for an option to go even faster than that,” Mayor Don Iveson explained. “So we picked the faster pace to deal with this issue.”
Iveson said the increased cost will translate to only a few dollars a year for the average homeowner.
“We’d be talking about an increase of maybe $16, $17 ramped in probably over four years. So, $4 in year one, another $4 in year two, another $4 in year three, another $4 in year four. And then $16 a year going forward buys you certainty that at some point we’re going to come fix the lane.”
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A report presented to council showed 69 per cent of Edmonton’s 1,175 kilometres of alleys needs to be fixed because of issues like potholes and slumping pavement.
“They’re terrible,” Iveson said of the city’s alleyways. “There’s no doubt that the back lanes, in a lot of cases, we paved over an inadequate base. So they have sort of a structural weakness to them. And then they were designed to last 20 years and some of them were paved 40, 50, 60 years ago.
“It’s no surprise that they’re kind of reverting to gravel slowly.”
It’s not known exactly when the work will start, as the city said a couple of years of planning will need to be done. In order to begin construction in 2019, a city report stated $100,000 would be required this year for planning, programming, pre-engineering and utility coordination, and $400,000 would be needed in 2018 for preliminary and detailed design efforts.
“People clearly expect and want them to be paved,” Iveson said. “That’s the standard that they want and they also want them fixed up. So it’s going to take – it could take us a generation to do it. It’s a huge, huge piece of work but there’s no time like the present to get started.”
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Iveson said alleys will be prioritized based on need and work will be lumped in with other planned construction projects to maximize efficiency.
In April 2016, city councillors voted in favour of rolling the cost of back alley repairs into the neighbourhood renewal program, which is supported by all Edmonton homeowners through a dedicated portion of property taxes, meaning all Edmontonians would be on the hook for alley upgrades, even if they don’t have one.
With files from Slav Kornik, Global News.
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