SANDRA M STANWAY
Brooks Bulletin
It’s expected that in the next couple of weeks the county will have the final tender design for the JBS road project.
“We ran into just a little bit of design trouble with some utilities on the access road that made us have to shift the alignment just a little bit,” said Geoff Tiffin, the county’s manager of engineering.
The trouble was a utility line that was not as deep as initially believed.
“It was shallower than we thought when we hydrovaced it,” he said.
“We’ve got a fairly good preliminary draft for the Highway 873 and Township 19-2 (Gun Club Road) intersection.”
The subdivision access will remain with a channelized right turn lane, delineated by concrete island similar to the one at the Highway 1 access to the meat plant.
The southbound acceleration-merge lane on Highway 873 will also be extended to give people travelling time to merge safely into traffic.
“It can all be accommodated within the existing right-of-way,” he said.
While it’s not expected that the County will put money into the project on the new road per se there will be staff time as well as other planned improvements along Gun Club Road that will have to be covered.
“It’s looking like we should be able to get (the road) done with the STIP grant that the province has allocated. We’re waiting for final design,” said CAO Matt Fenske.
In April the province announced a $1.8 million grant to the county which is managing the project to build a road from the plant’s south parking lot and to redesign Gun Club Road and the Highway 873 and Gun Club Road intersection.
County funds will likely also have to be included for alignment work on Gun Club Road.
“The county does have some improvements to do on the speed curve with some pipelines and approaches and access so the county will be spending a little money on 19-2 to accommodate some landowners for access and egress to Gun Club Road but we need a final design before we can put together a true estimate.”
As for JBS Foods, they will not be putting money into the road work but it is expected they will have to do work on their parking lot and possibly the security booth.
The new access road will be considered a government access road but who will maintain it in the future is part of a discussion.
With all the environmental work completed and signed off, Tiffin would like to get the design completed and to tender as soon as possible.
“Some of the culvert work, some of the tree work and scrubbing and brush removal do have some time lines within a restricted access period attached to it based on what we’re doing,” he said.
Tiffin will meet with the engineers this week to revise a few things that will also have to be discussed with the province.
The county has been discussing the road since 2023 following a presentation from JBS about the need to get its employees out of their parking lot in under 30 minutes.
“Every little change or every little thing that we encounter is kind of a big hiccup and we’ve got to go back and do redesign work.”
The county had about $1.2 million budgeted in 2024 for an assessment overlay on Gun Club Road.
“With this project the engineers evaluating everything said that we’ve got another handful of years anyway before we need to do the overlay,” said Fenske.