Major roads, greenhouse replacement, among top capital projects
Driving along many main thoroughfares — from Huron Church to Banwell to Provincial to Dominion roads — will be hampered or entirely prevented for periods of 2020, as the city embarks on a long list of capital projects.
City council approved a $1.2-billion, eight-year capital budget last week that includes $160 million in projects this year. Based on interviews Wednesday with city engineer Mark Winterton and manager of parks James Chacko, here’s a rundown of the major projects:
■ The $500,000 collection of offroad cycling facilities, most of which were built and opened last year, will be capped off this year with a new pump track in Little River Corridor Park. A public open house was held Wednesday night to seek input on the final design for the pump track.
■ The city’s deteriorated greenhouses, established in Lanspeary Park 94 years ago, will be replaced by a new operation in Jackson Park at a cost of $4.4 million. Tenders will be sought this spring, with construction starting in late summer or early fall and final completion in 2021.
Having a new, modernized operation will allow the city to grow more of its own plants, which have become increasingly expensive and hard to find from private growers.
There will be public consultations in future years to help decide how to incorporate the old greenhouse property into a redesigned Lanspeary Park.
■ Banwell Road, long regarded as inadequate for the growing population of East Riverside, with two lanes, gravel shoulders and no sidewalks from Tecumseh to E.C. Row Expressway, will be under construction this summer for the first phase of a $2-million project. Banwell will get four lanes and all the bells and whistles of a modern arterial road, between Tecumseh and Palmetto Street.
■ Next phase in future years will involve widening to Mulberry Drive, where there will be a roundabout. Finishing the road all the way to E.C. Row is not yet budgeted because that would include construction of an interchange at the expressway at a $60 million cost.
■ Cabana Road is in the midst of a $50-million expansion but this will be a minor year for traffic disruption as preliminary work (design, property acquisition, utility relocations) takes up the first year of the two-year project between Dougall Avenue and Mount Carmel Drive.
■ The bulk of the widening project for Provincial Road will happen in future years, but preliminary sewer and drainage work will require a 20-day closure of the busy road near the entrance to Costco.
■ The second year of a two-year $3.5-million project to improve the congested Dominion Boulevard/ Northwood Street intersection is when the actual construction happens, so there will be some significant traffic disruption in July and August. “We’re going to do our darndest to get it finished before school starts,” Winterton said.
■ Rehabbing the bridge on Riverside Drive at Little River, a $1-million project that had to be delayed last year due to high water levels, will cause the complete closure of Riverside, probably for a couple of months, Winterton said. However, this is a down year for the massive Riverside Vista project, as design and land acquisition will be conducted to prepare for the next phase of construction between St. Rose and St. Louis avenues.
■ A $5-million project to reconstruct Huron Church Road from Malden Road to Pool Avenue will start in April, assisted by $3 million from provincial Connecting Link funding. The project is similar to the traffic-disrupting $5.5-million project done last year to reconstruct Huron Church between Malden and Dorchester roads.
■ A $3-million reconstruction of E.C. Row near Dominion Boulevard will result in lane restrictions this summer. Another expressway project that may happen this summer is the $1-million rehabbing the eastbound collector overpass just east of Walker Road.
■ A $1-million rehab of the bridge on University Avenue at the CPR tracks will go out for tender later this year but whether the work will be done this year is still not determined.
■ There will be about $13.5 million in sewer projects that are part of the $90 million pegged for antiflood measures in Riverside and East Riverside. These include an innovative drainage project in waterlogged Tranby Park, to keep rainfall percolating into the ground instead of draining into nearby sewers, as well as sewer work on Tranby Road.
■ Other sewer projects, considered “early wins” in the hugely expensive efforts being identified in the Sewer Master Plan, will be discussed at upcoming open houses next week, said Winterton, who declined to get into specifics until after the open houses. They’re scheduled for Tuesday (5-8 p.m.) at Roseland Golf & Curling Club, Wednesday (3-8 p.m.) at the WFCU Centre’s Michigan Room and Thursday (5-8 p.m.) in the Windsor International Aquatic Centre’s lower east atrium.
■ Mic Mac Park’s Cullen Field, which had new $900,000 lighting installed last fall, will get new $300,000 bleachers this year.
■ Langlois Court Park in Remington Park will get its trails rebuilt in two phases, at a total cost of $800,000. The trails are also being rebuilt in Alton C. Parker Park just east of downtown at a cost of $60,000.
■ While much of the Riverside Minor Baseball Miracle Park is being financed by fundraising, a couple of city-paid projects are moving forward in 2020 at a cost of about $1 million. These include an expanded parking lot and accessible washrooms. They are also moving forward on a Canadian Tire Jump Start grant application that seeks $350,000 to combine with the city’s $150,000 and minor baseball’s $200,000 for $700,000 towards additional trails and other amenities.
■ Washrooms are being built for about $500,000 each at Alexander Park and Forest Glade Park.
■ Though construction won’t start this year, preliminary work and land acquisition will commence to remedy a long-standing South Windsor headache, the intersection where South Cameron Boulevard intersects with Howard Avenue just south of the railroad tracks and Devonshire Mall.
At busy times, it’s nearly impossible to turn left from South Cameron, Winterton said. So the plan is to realign the intersection so South Cameron continues through Howard, over the tracks and connects with Sidney Avenue just south of the mall.
“That will be a big job, $10 million plus,” he remarked. He’s hoping there will be funding from the province or feds to help out. If not, it will likely need to be financed over multiple years.
■ A similarly expensive project — addressing the bottleneck on Dougall Avenue at the CN Rail overpass with a bike-pedestrian tunnel and creating a signalized intersection at Dougall and Ouellette Place at a total cost of $8.9 million — was started in 2019 will be completed in the coming months.