Provincial legislation appears to be placing more pressure on small municipalities to maintain roads and sidewalks.
Works committee chairman Dan Yake asked Works Superintendent Gary Williamson to explain how provincially mandated changes to minimum standard regulations will affect the township.
“We haven’t changed them. They’ve been legislated,” said Yake.
New regulations require township staff to patrol roads that are representative of weather conditions and the type of roads in the township.
That will need to be done once a day for each of the the township works yards. Those patrols would be in addition to normal patrolling required under previous standards.
Patrolling is done by the foreman at each yard, and will take additional time and create additional paperwork. In turn, it will reduce the time that person can spend operating snow plows to clear the roads.
Estimates are the inspections and paperwork could add between a half hour to two hours per day. The township will also have to adhere to new levels of sidewalk inspection, which require all sidewalks to be inspected at least once a year to identify any vertical defects exceeding 2 centimetres (1 inch). Once identified those defects will need to be fixed within 14 days. Again, the inspections will require more staff time and paperwork.
Williamson said the minimum standards were originally created to address liability issues and, “Those standards were to be reviewed every five years.”
One of the items reviewed was patrol time. There are certain standards based on the classification of the road. Under the township’s classification, the road required inspection once per month. Now, it is every day.
Williamson said the review suggested that is not sufficient in the winter, and while directed more to larger centres, “We all fall under that umbrella. Now we have to have to pick a road representative of township roads and the weather conditions.”
The road choice is based on prevailing winds, storm direction, normal types of precipitation, hills, shade and surface conditions.
Williamson said representative roads could change on a daily basis because of the weather.
Further, it seems that while daily inspections might work, that excludes weather changes.
But, he said, if there is snow on roads and workers are out at 3am clearing the roads, “The legislation says that’s still not good enough – and we’ll still have to patrol the roads and document it.”
Williamson said it is not so bad in the urban areas because those are obviously small areas. He added the foremen also are plow operators, which means time patrolling roads is time away from plowing them.
Williamson said they knew the new sidewalk standards were coming.
“What it means is that now we’ll have to have someone walk every block of sidewalk in the urban areas and document what they find.”
He said the good News is the standards requirements have not affected winter maintenance of sidewalks – because they could not come to a consensus.
“It just keeps going.”
Williamson said it is not as much an issue for larger communities where municipalities have a person dedicated to do the patrols. Small centres, such as Wellington North, do not have designated staff in that role.
“What it is leading to, is we’ll have to get someone dedicated to do the patrols.”
The other problem it raises, is because of limitations to hours of work, time off has to be provided.
But if patrols are required seven days a week, work schedules will be affected.
“There’s a bunch of issues and this is being legislated.”
As well, Williamson said the municipality has been told everything must be in place by the start of winter, so he is working on a recording system that will not take to much time.
He believes that the next item coming from the province will be GPS tracking of the township equipment.
“It’s real time tracking that can be downloaded onto a computer.”
