ST. PAUL – A portion of Highway 29 within the St. Paul area, is once again slated for road work.
Signs were posted along the highway, indicating work would be done this summer.
“I’ve seen the signs as well. There’s going to be maintenance on the highway,” said Town of St. Paul CAO Steven Jeffery. He believes the work will take about 10 days to complete.
Jeffery said over 30 km of road work was done in 2023 along the highway, but the work was inadequate.
“What we were left with was a lot of uneven areas . . . areas that were needing repair.”
Bonnyville-Cold Lake-St. Paul MLA Scott Cyr, during a townhall meeting in St. Paul on July 16, agreed that the 2023 work on the highway was done poorly, adding the contractor for the project was not paid for some of the work “because of how bad some of it was done.”
Another particular concern for Cyr is that the stretch of highway is wavy along the edge, which is not how a highway should be.
“It’s tough to follow a side of a highway that is moving all over the place,” he said, which is a similar concern he expressed during the Town of Elk Point’s July 14 council meeting.
During the Elk Point meeting the MLA said, “I think they were drunk," when speaking to the work that was done.
“Highways are normally straight, [and] this wasn’t,” Cyr told Elk Point council. “There were eight [to] nine [inch] drops on the approaches,” and there were a lot of heaves, he said.
“I had to do a lot of apologizing.”
Speaking to Lakeland This Week at his townhall meeting in St. Paul, Cyr said, “I am hearing loud and clear from local residents that this needs to be dealt with.”
He added, “We, as a province, need to take pride in all our work. This is not something that I take pride in.”
From the Town’s perspective, Jeffery said he hopes the province will also look at doing work on the portion of Highway 29 that passes through the town, which is the community’s main street.
“In many areas, we see overlays on top of overlays to the point where they’ve actually filled in the gutter portion of the curb,” said the Town's CAO.
Asphalt is starting to break down and requires repairs.
“We are interested to learn from Alberta Transportation when the Town [of St. Paul’s] portion of Highway 29 is going to show up on a capital plan in order to have the town repaved,” said Jeffery.
Information from Alberta Transportation regarding the specific work being done on the highway was not available as of Lakeland This Week’s press deadline.
