With any luck, major resident concerns with the state of Water Street here should be solved by the end of this week, township officials say.
For the past several months, the local street from High Street to Bridge Street has been under construction. However, managing director of infrastructure Colin Baker says the first layer of pavement to reopen the road should be in place by Dec. 18.
“With a project this large in scope, the journey to completion has been a long one,” Baker explained. “The township and the contractor XL Excavating and Site Servicing certainly appreciate everyone’s patience during the inconvenience that goes along with the construction process.”
On Dec. 14, Baker provided an additional report to Centre Wellington councillors on various projects, stating, “although its been a great December for construction … that window is quickly closing.”
Baker said for Water Street, the contractors are wrapping their schedule and planning to pave the street on Thursday and Friday.
He noted not all the curb work is completed – so that will happen next year. Also, the sidewalks and a lot of the installation of new utilities will be done in 2017.
In addition, there will be some work within the boulevards during the winter.
“I think residents in the area will be quite happy the road will be paved and maintained this winter,” said Baker.
When asked if there would be additional closures of Water Street in 2017, Baker said “it would not to be to the extent of this year.” He added, “The road will be paved and open to traffic. There may be the need to close a lane on occasion to accommodate trucks.”
As to driveways dug up for the Water Street project, Baker said they’ll be temporarily reinstated with gravel this year and fully reinstated next year.
Councillor Kirk McElwain said he was surprised to learn the end date for the project is next August or September. He asked, “Is there that much more work to be done?”
Baker said the hope is to have things largely wrapped up by next summer, but there is still considerable work to be done installing new utilities and reconnecting the home.
“We needed to set proper expectations,” he said.
McElwain said when the road reopens this winter, there will still be no sidewalks.
Baker said there was recognition of that, so plans are to do some line marking on the pavement on the north side of the road to delineate a walking area to line up with the Bissell Park pedestrian bridge. This would provide a 1.5-metre pedestrian zone on the north side of the road, Baker said.
Additional information
The project includes a rebuild of several hundred metres of road from High Street to Bridge Street.
Key features of the overall project include:
– a new 300mm watermain that officials say will improve fire flows and water transmission between the Bridge Street and Daniel Crescent water towers;
– a new 375mm sanitary sewer line that will serve current residents and future urban development areas in Elora;
– stormwater management features, including storm sewers to collect runoff from the road and convey it to stormwater outfalls to the Grand River (the outfalls will include provisions to reduce the flow of stormwater to the river and minimize river bank erosion);
– traffic calming curves in the road to assist pedestrian crossings and encourage drivers to reduce speeds;
– shared cycling facilities as identified in the township’s trails master plan, including signage and sharing arrows painted on the road (officials say Water Street is an important cycling link between Fergus and Elora);
– a sidewalk on the south side of Water Street (in some areas, retaining walls will be required to address existing steep slopes);
– a signalized pedestrian crossing at the Bissell Park entrance/pedestrian bridge location and a second un-signalized pedestrian crossing at O’Brien Park;
– on-street parking on the south side of Water Street; and
– increased parking spaces at O’Brien Park through the conversion of parallel parking to perpendicular parking (an accessible parking space will be added in this area) and additional parallel parking spaces along the park frontage on the north side of Water Street.
