While the city’s infrastructure, specifically our roads, are in fairly good condition, city staff is suggesting more needs to be done to keep them from deteriorating further.
A special council meeting was held Monday night at city hall, where councillors got an update on the condition of everything from the city’s sewers to roads and bridges.
It’s clear our infrastructure, for the most part, matches up with any other municipality in the province – but the city’s infrastructure planning manager, Stephen Wintle, told council there’s dozens of kilometres of roads, sidewalks and sewers that need updating soon.
And Norm Levac, the city’s municipal works general manager, said Cornwall is falling behind its target of spending $4 million a year in road improvements.
The city has found 38 km of roads, 23 km of sidewalks, 55 km of sewers and 60 km of water mains that need repair work.
Wintle said the city does as much as 10 km of road repair a year.
A newly completed analysis of Cornwall’s roads suggests 39 per cent of the network is in “very good” shape. Across Ontario that number falls to 22 per cent. A further 23 per cent of Cornwall roads are “good” and only half a per centage point of our city streets are “very poor.”
Two of the city’s 11 bridges are either “fair” or in a “poor” state – like the CN overpass on Brookdale Avenue which Wintle told councillors will cost in the neighbourhood of $700,000 to repair.
Between 2008 and 2011, city hall doled out about $1.6 million a year on its water system, on top of $1.2 million budgeted for the sewer systems and $3.1 million for roads.
