Road to Alberta prosperity filled with potholes

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By The Canadian Press

Potholes half a metre across and 10 centimetres deep are a nuisance on any street, and when they started dotting a major Edmonton corridor driven by more than 120,000 vehicles a day, the city decided to act.

Edmonton?s road department secured funding to fix the bumpy stretch of the Whitemud freeway, then put the project out for tender and waited.

For the first time in history, there wasn?t a single bid, said Joe Kabarchuk, director of roadways construction. ?We were shocked.?

The picture is the same across much of Alberta. Public infrastructure needs work, but it can be difficult in the province?s supercharged economy to
actually get it done.

April?s provincial budget committed $18.2 billion ? more than the total budgets of Manitoba and Saskatchewan combined ? toward schools, hospitals, highways and municipal projects in an effort ?to catch up on the building,? as Finance Minister Lyle Oberg put it.

But even though the money?s there, it may be hard to deliver on all of the budget?s promises.

?There?s certainly going to be a continued challenge when it comes to finding the ability to secure bidders and labour supply to actually create the projects that are being funded,? said Melissa Blake, the mayor of Wood Buffalo, the municipality which encompasses the oilsands city of Fort McMurray.

?Even if I had all of the money I need to achieve the project work that?s required for our population growth, I don?t think that there?s capacity in the community to deliver that.?

Wood Buffalo wanted to build a two-part RCMP station and estimated $30 million for the project. City officials were stunned to get a bid of $51 million to build just one part.

Blake and other mayors say such massively inflated bids often reveal contractors who are busy with other projects and really don?t want the municipal jobs.

?When it comes to municipalities being competitive, our jobs often aren?t quite as big as some of these other ones.?

The Merit Contractors Association, which represents 1,200 companies with 35,000 workers, figures the new provincial government money is still good for the industry.

?Having said that, we?re going to add about $3.6 billion in new projects on top of the record number of $170 billion that is already out there,? said Bill Stewart, association vice-president.

?So we?re going to have to get some people to build all these projects.?

And it appears municipal projects are among the first to suffer.

The central Alberta town of Ponoka had to take a skateboard park back to the drawing board after trying several times to find someone willing to pour the concrete.

Leduc, just south of Edmonton, had trouble getting a package of sidewalk and street repair projects done. Mayor Greg Krischke said one part didn?t get any bids at all and another bid was five times higher than expected.

Critics say roads, schools, sewers and hospitals are basic building blocks for day-to-day life that were neglected while the Conservatives paid down Alberta?s debt.

Then came the energy-fuelled boom, bringing a tidal wave of new people who wear down the roads with their vehicles, fill classrooms with their children and show up at hospitals when they get sick.

?I think the idea that we can stop doing project work right now until times are more conducive to doing it is a fallacy,? said Blake, pointing out that Fort McMurray?s wastewater treatment capacity is good for a population of 50,000 people but is dealing with 64,000.

?There?s only so far that you can stretch your infrastructure.?

Ken Gibson, executive director of the Alberta Construction Association, says his group has been working on ways to ease the burden on construction companies.

One idea would be to get anyone with proposed projects to tender in a staggered way so companies wouldn?t have a flurry of activity and then nothing.