9th Street East in downtown Owen Sound will be rebuilt all the way to 2nd Avenue East, as originally planned.
City council decided at a special meeting on Wednesday to approve the project, which will be added onto existing work along the street.
The plan was originally for the street to be rebuilt between 2nd Avenue West and 2nd Avenue East, including a new bridge over the Sydenham River.
But the project was truncated at 1st Avenue East due to costs that were higher than expected.
Since then, council has considered on three different occasions a suggestion to once again add the last block to the project.
The first two times, a majority of council said they couldn’t justify the cost.
But with another road reconstruction project recently put on the back burner, consideration was again given to 9th Street East
Councillor Bill Twaddle argued last week, as he has done in the past, that deteriorating infrastructure under the road means work between 1st and 2nd Avenues would have to be done soon anyway.
He said it would not be fair to downtown businesses to close the road again so soon after this project. He also said the city could not expect to rebuild the last block for what it will pay now – just over $209,000, which is 10 thousand dollars more than the previous quoted price.
The infrastructure is indeed in poor shape.
City operations director John Johnston says an inspection shows there is a crack in the existing brick sanitary sewer, which indicates a serious structural issue.
E.C. King Contracting will do the work as an extension of the current project and expects to complete it by mid-December, adding about two weeks to the entire 9th Street project.
The slightly higher cost is to allow for cold weather concrete work as well as sub-contracting of portions of the project.
This is because E.C. King accepted other projects after Owen Sound first eliminated the last block of 9th Street East from the plans.
The city will dip into various funds in order to pay for the project – $90,000 from its roofwater separation budget, $50,168 from watermain rehabilitation and $69,000 from asphalt resurfacing.
Johnston says this money shuffling will not impact Owen Sound’s overall budget, nor will it interfere with other works planned by the city.
