A bump in the road for the city budget after results of a roads needs study were released Tuesday.
The study was done by DM Wills engineers of Peterborough and found the roads in the city need a significant investment. According to Eric St. Pierre of DM Mills, 697 km of roads need work now and it would cost $87 million dollars over 5 years to rectify. Over the next 6 to 10 years another 430km of roads will be starting to show some stress and would cost 45 million dollars to fix.
Our inquiries to the city for the location of the roads needing immediate work were not answered.
Despite the state of the worst roads St. Pierre says it’s not necessarily a good idea to fix the worst roads first. “Keep the good roads good” he says. It’s much more expensive in the long run to reconstruct a road than to repair it”
A “worst first” approach can lead to an overall decline in the roads council heard. And they were urged not to take that approach even though councillors are getting a lot of phone calls from constituents about the state of the roads.
The city currently spends about $8-9 million dollars a year on the roads. The study show that amount would have to triple to keep up with the repairs.
 photo credit: _chrisUK Pothole via photopin (license)