Sometimes you wonder if government representatives ever actually sit down and talk to one another?
A case in point is the City of Yorkton and the province in regards to Yorkton West Truck Route Bypass."The Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure in late 2010 instructed Wardrop Engineering Inc. to review the Yorkton West Truck Route Bypass. The City received a copy of a memo in January that warrants the City advising the Ministry of the concerns about identified alignments," explained Gord Shaw, Director of Planning & Engineering with the City in a report circulated to the regular meeting of Council Monday.
The matter came before Council Monday when City Administration presented a report to Council detailing its concerns that each one of the options being put forward to the Department of Highways used Queen Street as a connector road across the southern edge of the city.
The use of Queen Street was seen as a definite problem for the city, since it would likely leave a truck route going through a residential section of the city as it is likely to expand south of the street with resident subdivisions in the future on three-quarters of land the City already owns.
Actually the consultants hired to put together the report for the province, Wardrop Engineering Inc., might have discussed the scenario with Yorkton while putting together their report for the Ministry, rather than drawing up multiple alignment options, all of them using a street the City is now clearly opposed to seeing used.
"The City is not in favour of having the West Truck Route Bypass utilize Queen Street. The reason for doing so is that it believes a better route alignment is the south that will allow for a direct connection to Hwy 16 to the southeast of the City," stated a report circulated to Council Monday.
"The City also believes that if Queen Street is utilized as the connector to Hwy 16, this will be a serious impediment to the long term growth of the community to the south. The City has an interest in the lands to the south of Queen Street and believes these will be developed as residential. If Queen Street is utilized this will effectively cut off these lands from other areas of the City as future development occurs."
It makes logical sense from a City perspective, and is something which was fairly easy to predict given the City has only two directions to reasonably expand residentially, northeast and to the south, crossing Queen Street.
In preparing a bypass plan, that might have been something taken into consideration. It is rather clear Yorkton has been growing, and the high likelihood of a potash mine would suggest greater growth ahead. A bypass being built now should factor such expansion into the equation, and do what it is supposed to do and provide a true 'bypass' for truck service.
Certainly headlines in this paper over the last couple of years foretell growth, from City land annexation plans, to the construction of two canola crushing plants, and the aforementioned potash expansion.It is also rather interesting while Wardrop put forward several route options, every one of them used Queen Street. We might have expected at least one might have looked at an option which offered up a more southerly crossing across the city's southern edge.
Unfortunately that didn't happen and the City is now forced to lobby for a route option which would no doubt require additional study, but is ultimately the only option that is logical for Yorkton's future.
