By Thia James

Warm weather helps paving along

Oct 24, 2014 | 7:05 AM

A long stretch of warmer weather brought a boost to Prince Albert’s paving season.

Paving work has continued deeper into October than usual – in a normal year, work ceases after Thanksgiving due to the coming cold weather.

In the last 10 days, Mayor Greg Dionne said the City has been catching up on its scheduled paving work. Wet weather, contractor scheduling conflicts and a rash of water main breaks earlier this year led to delays to road repair projects.

“I was out last weekend and B&B [Asphalt, the contractor] was working on five or six different sites at a time. They had, I think, every one of their workers out. I was very impressed [with] how B&B is trying to react to the poor weather,” Dionne said, and added they will work as hard as they can until “freeze-up.”

As of the end of September, the City had finished 55 per cent of the paving work this year. (LINK TO: http://panow.com/article/477085/paving-far-complete-year) But Dionne contends that this isn’t the full picture – that was based on the invoices they had received. On Thursday, he said that at that point they had only had the invoices from the middle of August, and there was still a month’s worth of invoices outstanding.

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“I’m going to wait another week or 10 days until freeze-up, until the paving program shuts down and at that time we’ll do a comprehensive review and report,” he said.

It is still highly likely that there will be projects not completed and held over until next year. Dionne said there always are projects left over because the public works department is only allowed to spend $4 million dollars. He said that last year, about 96 per cent of the work was completed, and the carryover was minor.

Carryover usually happens when the paving crew hits soft spots and the project goes from a paving and milling project to one that involves a dig, Dionne said.

“So, we will not allow the department to go over budget, so, sometimes what will happen is we’ll have to carry over three or four streets that we could not afford to do this year, because we ran out of money.”

And comparatively speaking, Dionne thinks the City is pretty close to achieving the same amount of work this year as it did last year. He said it depends on what the weather does in the next 10-14 days.

A wrap-up date for the project list attached to the $4 million paving program for 2014 has not yet been set.

tjames@panow.com

On Twitter: @thiajames