The future of the proposed heavy truck bypass around Estevan is a little bit clearer thanks to a recent meeting.
Held last week in Regina, the three day meeting's purpose was to resolve concerns about the bypass which has been in the planning stages for roughly two years. At issue is the intersection on the west end of the route.
The initial plans called for the truck route to intersect with Highway 39 near the Rafferty Dam turnoff and Pioneer Grain Terminal. However, a number of concerns were raised about the intersection with many calling it a potential safety hazard due to the high volume of traffic in the area. There were also worries about the intersection's proximity to the rail tracks.
Those concerns prompted the Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure to re-evaluate their design. Part of that reevaluation process was last week's value engineering study which was conducted by a consulting firm and attended by officials from the ministry, the City of Estevan, CP Railway, Pioneer Grain and the RM of Estevan.
Doug Wakabayashi, a spokesman for the ministry, said all the parties involved "reviewed the functional design of the route to ensure that the design, as presented, will achieve the outcome that everybody expects in terms of the functionality, the operation of it, safety things like that.
"They brainstorm and come up with ideas or options that would either enhance the functionality of the design or ensure that ultimately the taxpayer is receiving value for money."
Wakabayashi said when the brainstorming process was completed, the ideas were narrowed down to a few they felt the ministry would want to look at in greater detail.
"What they narrowed down to was some options for the west end of the bypass, some options for both the location and layout of the interchange to accommodate future traffic growth and some possible increased activity at the grain terminal."
Although he couldn't provide specifics on what ideas were presented at the meeting, Wakabayashi called the session productive and said the next step is for a report to be compiled by the consulting firm hired by the ministry.
"When we receive that report, we will review it, have some more talks with the stakeholders like the City and the RM, look at which options we want to flush out in more detail and then go back to our design consultant to do some more work in terms of more tangible design and more accurate costing."
Mayor Gary St. Onge represented the City for one of the three days and was "generally pleased" with how the process went. St. Onge said it appears likely that the intersection will be moved west to get it away from the Pioneer Terminal and Rafferty Dam turn off.
"Although the final report is going to come to us, it looks like they are going to move it further west and make provisions for an interchange somewhere down the road," said St. Onge who noted City manager Jim Puffalt was in attendance for the other two days of the meeting.
"It looks good. It looks like they are not adding a lot of cost to it so it should come in within budget. We'll see what the final report says."
As for a future timeline, Wakabayashi said it will likely be a couple of months before they receive the report and come up with a revised functional plan for the west intersection. As for when construction might begin, he said it is premature to speculate on a date.
"We want to meet the expectations of the community and industry and square as many circles as we can before construction. When you do developments of this nature, it is very difficult to make everybody happy but we certainly want to have something that will work for the greatest majority of stakeholders."
