Wellington County has adopted a policy outlining when a road can be transferred from a local municipality to the county.
At the May 25 meeting, county council approved a roads committee recommendation to adopt a policy which indicates a road should be transferred to the County of Wellington for further capital and maintenance requirements when the average annual daily traffic exceeds the minimum for a Class 2 road under the province’s minimum maintenance standard for three consecutive years.
“A Class 2 road requires 24-hour winter maintenance and most local municipalities do not do that, so it was felt that possibly a Class 2 road should be the road that is looked at as county road,” explained councillor Gary Williamson, chair of the roads committee.
Williamson stressed the move didn’t mean a roads rationalization study would be undertaken.
“I want to just clarify this is not a road rationalization study which some of you may know has been a hot topic for a number of years and never really goes anywhere,” he said. “This is a totally different question – it’s how does a road become a county road?”
County engineer Gord Ough said, “Whenever there’s been a road rationalization before it’s been very disruptive. You have to make up a whole bunch of new rules.”
Councillor Gregg Davidson said the guidelines would be applied in a practical manner.
“It has to make sense,” he said. “So if you have a 10 mile stretch of road and two miles of it meets the guidelines, that would not be considered for a county road. It needs to be the total length of the road, or within reason … there has to be some rationale that would be considered and that would be considered by council at the time.”
Williamson noted the three-year time frame for traffic counts allows for “special circumstances” such as road closures or detours that could temporarily impact traffic flow on a local road.
“You may also have projects that are not within county control, like the Morriston bypass,” he pointed out.
Councillor Kelly Linton said, “So the trigger point is a municipality will come to the county and say, ‘We feel like the situation has changed, we want to trigger this approach to making a road a county road.’”
Williams said tracking mechanisms are in place to determine when a road reaches Class 2 status, “so your own municipality will know, or should know, when it reaches the point it has to provide that service.”
Councillor George Bridge suggested taking the process a step further.
“When they downloaded all the provincial highways to us, they must have had some rationalization at that point in time,” said Bridge, eliciting laughter around the council table.
He added, “We’ve got a couple of situations .. where we may have to do four lanes … which to me, should be put back to the province.
“So when we’re looking at this I think we should also be looking at … when we come up to these situations how do we go back to them and say ‘we’re going to upload one of our roads, because that’s going to cost us to make one of our roads four lanes,’” said Bridge.
“I just put it out there.”
The current classification of roads throughout the county is in accordance with criteria set out by the province many years ago.
In 2002 the province created a set of minimum maintenance standards for public roads. As part of those standards, there is a minimum response time for snowplows and sanders to revisit those roads with a specified depth of snow accumulation and a certain average annual daily traffic level.
