Ten years after the province took responsibility for Deerfoot Trail from the city, it is looking to return the urban freeway to Calgary’s control.
Transportation Minister Luke Ouellette doesn’t foresee the move until at least mid-decade, but his interest in a handover is catching Calgary aldermen by surprise.
Assuming control of Deerfoot Trail would leave the city dependent on provincial grants, or its own coffers, for safety upgrades and repaving the 50-kilometre ribbon.
The city would also face maintenance and snow-clearing costs, which can run up to $8 million annually.
“All of those things have a significant consequence on city taxpayers,” Ald. Diane Colley-Urquhart said.
Both sides say any talk about a handover is still far off.
It would come sometime after the further planned Stoney Trail extensions provide a north-south bypass for motorists.
Construction on the southeast leg, expected to begin this spring, would complete a bypass option for provincial traffic by fall 2013.
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“Once we have our new highway, which is the ring road all the way around the city, we will be negotiating with them to take (it) back,” Ouellette said in a recent interview. “The Deerfoot Trail won’t be our highway.”
The province took over Deerfoot in 2000, along with the then-puny Stoney Trail, as part of a new infrastructure strategy and its efforts toward establishing a trade corridor to Mexico.
Calgary kept responsibility for policing its main roadway, and reaped money from speeding and other traffic fines. But the province became responsible for the welfare of the infrastructure, including a contract with Carmacks for winter and summer maintenance that runs between $5 million and $8 million a year, according to Alberta Transportation.
The province’s $170 million in Deerfoot upgrades over the decade included extending it past Marquis of Lorne Trail, and in 2005 finally making it a free-flow corridor by removing the last set of traffic lights at Douglasdale Boulevard S.E.
Trent Bancarz, a spokesman for Alberta Transportation, could not explain how the return would work, given that negotiations haven’t started. But he pointed to a similar move with Okotoks’s Northridge and Southridge Drives about seven years ago, after the Deerfoot extension took pressure off the town road that connects with Highway 2A.
“It’s typically been a matter that the road no longer serves a highway function, so it is, for all intents and purposes, a local road,” Bancarz said. “So the thought is that it should be a local responsibility.”
Giving the Deerfoot back to the city as a local road apparently wasn’t part of the 2000 agreement that saw the province take jurisdiction over it, Bancarz said. It certainly had never been discussed with council members including Colley-Urquhart, who pushed the province to work with city hall and Calgary Police on a Deerfoot safety audit, and then to actually follow the review’s findings.
Ald. Bob Hawkesworth, whose northwest ward borders the freeway, said that while who does what has sometimes been confusing, he has few complaints with the Tory government’s management of Calgary’s key artery.
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