County of Brant council members unanimously accepted a bid for the East River Road resurfacing project at their Administration and Operations Committee meeting on Tuesday, April 11, 2023.
The bid was submitted by Cox Construction Ltd. with a proposed cost of $786,875.70 excluding HST. This was the lowest cost of the seven proposals received by the County of Brant Purchasing Department prior to the deadline on March 30, 2023.
There are sufficient funds approved in the Capital budget for the project and it will be funded from the Federal Gas Tax Fund designed for community infrastructure projects.
East River Road is currently a narrow two-lane road that serves as the southern access to Glen Morris.
The goal of the project is to pulverize the existing asphalt surface of East River Road from Glen Morris Road to McLean School Road and prepare a leveled granular base for two layers of new asphalt paving.
The project will also include the replacement of driveway culverts to help redirect rainwater along the length of the road.
Councillor John Bell noted that the section of road under discussion is in better condition than others and asked about repairing the section of East River Road from Blue Lake Road to McLean School Road as he noted it was in worse condition.
Rob Walton, General Manager of Operations for the County of Brant, responded.
“The section you’re looking at certainly has some concerns with the actual road platform in its condition, also there’s some sections there that have slope stability issues which we are actually looking at as well, but it’s not quite simple as saying ‘this road is in worse condition, we can do that now,’” he said. “For this section we’re looking at here right now (Glen Morris to McLean), it’s at a point in life where we can do certain works and bring it up to a very high standard and that’s what we’re doing and all of them [road sections] are put through that sort of process. If we had unlimited money there’s all kinds of other things we could do, but that’s the process right now and we do yearly reports on the needs study in the state of the infrastructure and this all falls out of that.”
Walton added that he did not have a time frame on hand for the work to be done from Blue Lake Road to McLean Road.
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
