Council is throwing its full support behind the idea in principle of building a secondary highway to serve our region, based on a recommendation from the Recovery Task Force which had the unanimous support of the Wood Buffalo Recovery Committee.
“We’re all in on this one,” said Mayor Melissa Blake, who said construction of a secondary highway has long been something sought by the community but, similar to the twinning of Highway 63, unfortunately make take a major event to have enough political will to be able to get the funding dollars and levels of government in place to make it a reality.
“We have this unique tragedy and opportunity that comes from the time that we’re serving in and the best intelligence that we have about what the right thing to do for this region will be and as much as it looks like it’s precipitated by a single event it is anything but. As Marty (Giles, WBRC member) has pointed out, I’ve been involved with study after study after study and supporting the idea that there needs to be something independent,” said Blake.
She said while there was support for it at the time the secondary highway took a back seat to improving traffic within the community but the safety component of providing an evacuation route in the event of either a wildfire or a dangerous goods incident can no longer be ignored.
All members of council present for the meeting voted in support of the recommendation, which includes exploring the option of building a proposed East Clearwater Highway which would connect Anzac and Fort McKay with access roads to Fort McMurray along the route.
With the approval of the idea in principle Tuesday night council will now officially solicit the Government of Alberta for 2017 funding support for the pre-design which includes cost-sharing opportunities for the proposed East Clearwater Highway, with the intent of improving resiliency and public safety for the residents of the Municipality.
Mayor Melissa Blake will also be writing letters to the province indicating the following:
WBRC Chair Jeanette Bancarz and WBRC mitigation sub-committee chair Marty Giles presented to council on the proposed highway, saying it needs to be considered the top priority for mitigation even as other projects including FireSmart and the neighbourhood egresses are already under way.
Council agreed to commit $5 million in the 2017 budget to pre-design for the project provided the other levels of government are on board to help share the cost of what is expected to be a $1.5 billion dollar project, the building and funding of which will likely be spread over several annual budgets.
The project
“So, what is pre-design? It confirms the alignment of the East Clearwater Highway, it performs any geo-technical work related to the alignment, provides a traffic model that considers evacuation of the region, performs any required stakeholder engagement, determines the project scope, cost, and schedule to construct the highway, and it also needs to consider any previous and ongoing work to be viewed from a lens of public safety and improving resiliency of the municipality,” said Jeanette Bancarz, saying that’s why the idea is being brought forth again.
“We know that it’s been discussed for quite some time in our region, but mostly from an economic perspective not from a safety perspective, so we believe it’s very timely to be bringing this opportunity back to the region,” she said.
Pre-design would also include the cost-sharing options for the total project and, initially, for the RMWB’s share of the pre-design cost to be one third of the estimated $15 million with the other levels of government providing the remaining $10 million. Bancarz said that cost-sharing is supported by the fact the highway would include bridges, paved roadways, and would serve as both an evacuation route and possibly as a dangerous goods route.
“This isn’t just about protecting us, there’s Canadians, we have six provinces of people that work up here and go home,” said Giles of people who work at his company, Northstar Ford. “They need to be protected as well. It’s everybody, and that’s just our little business. We have every province, every territory up here at some point and they need to have another way out.”
He said that is why the federal government needs to have a stake in the building of the highway as much as the provincial and municipal governments do, and he’s offered to help convince the other levels of government to commit to funding the project.
“The ladies I spend most of my time with right now is Jeanette Bancarz and Dennine Giles and they both said I could be seconded to whatever you need me to do, to go to Ottawa, I can go to Edmonton, we can do bake sales, and I am yours, free of charge, and we’ll pay our own transportation costs and so on,” he said.
Giles said he knew about the proposals in 2011 to build another highway to serve the region and, though he fully supported it at the time, did nothing to show that support.
“I didn’t come down to council, I didn’t volunteer my time in 2011, I didn’t get all fired up about this. I knew all about it, and what did I do? Nothing. Until now,” he said. Now, he said he’s going to work to make sure the highway is built.
Community support for the highway
He said he was encouraged by both the number of delegates who came to speak on the subject and the wide representation they offered of viewpoints from within the community.
“It was a whole swathe of our community, it wasn’t just one person that came up or whatever, it seemed like it touched everybody,” he said, adding that community-wide support could prove useful in convincing other levels of government to get on board.
Among the presenters were Bryce Kumka, head of the Fort McMurray Chamber of Commerce, who said the entire chamber is in support of the highway, a teacher who spoke of the need for the highway on May 3, the day she and several other staff and students were forced to make impossible decisions about where to drive a bus full of other people’s children, and a mom whose own mother and children were separated from her in the fire and they drove north to what she knew was a “dead end” because the highway south was closed to her family.
“I’m putting my trust in you all, my elected officials in Edmonton, my elected officials in Ottawa, to please take care of myself and family,” said Melissa Gallant, the mom and caregiver who spoke first among the delegates.
Listen to some of the delegates’ presentations below.
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Industry, Giles said, has already confirmed interest in participating, but it’s not yet clear what their role will look like, whether they directly fund the project in a public private partnership, receive royalty breaks in exchange for funding support, include a toll on the highway or some other iteration of their financial support that hasn’t been discussed yet.
The move is complementary to ongoing mitigation efforts, including revising the emergency management plan and flood mitigation as well as work to build egress routes, or alternate ways out, in neighbourhoods in our community that only have one way in and out.
A word of caution
While Councillor Tyran Ault did vote in support of building the highway he questioned it being the top priority, saying the neighbourhood evacuation routes demanded at least as much if not more attention.
“I worry about our messaging that we’re going forward to them with this and, like Keith (McGrath, Councillor) said, it’s a miracle of god everyone got out safely but I think the biggest miracle is that people got out of those neighbourhoods safely,” Ault said. “I would hate to see another fire start in the spring and they can’t get out of the neighbourhood that they’re rebuilding right now.”
Giles confirmed a report is coming to council on the progress being made on those routes which were already approved in principle.
Ault also cautioned that if this highway is something the community wants to see built, as made evident by the support from delegates and the unanimous support of the WBRC, then it should have the support of council, but said that would come at a cost.
“We had some projects that got pushed through and moved around earlier this summer and we don’t have money to do the stuff that we were planning to do, let alone add this,” he said. “I just want people’s expectations to be very real about what they’re going to get for levels of services for other things here.
“We’ll get labelled the bad guys in terms of what else we have to cut but if this is a priority for the community this needs to be a priority for this council to and we can’t have dream projects anymore,” he said.
Mayor Blake said in all reality those dream projects had faded from reality with the downturn and now the focus needs to be on providing the best services for the community as it is now, without the considerations for future growth that had been projected before the end of 2014.
