County receives funding for Township Road 120 rehabilitation project

By Justin Seward

Commentator/Courier

Cypress County’s Director of Public Works, Kim Dalton, updated Cypress County council that the Township Road 120 rehabilitation project has its funding in place at their July 21 meeting.
The county has received $3,974,016 of STIP (Strategic Transportation Infrastructure Program) road grant funding, which is the 50 per cent funded project criterion for a project that has been in the works since late 2018.
The municipality has allocated $2.5 million in Federal Gas Tax funding and the remaining balance funding will come from the MSI grant funding and developer contributions.
“We received grant funding to do not only the infrastructure, the road rehabilitation, but some intersection improvements,” said Dalton.
Council approved for the project to seek STIP funding last year and was included in the 2020 capital budget.
There will be a few more details to work out in the next year.
“We’ll be working with local landowners. That will be next challenge over the next year is to make sure we have everything in place ready for the project of that scale. It’s about an 18-kilometre paving project. We’ve got to move some approaches, move utilities, and buy right-of-ways. That’s going to be the busy stuff for us over the next nine to 10 months.”
County administration and WSP engineering will meet with Alberta Transportation to discuss the Seven Persons Creek crossing, Highway 3 and Trans-Canada Highway junctions.
The assessment looked at corridor traffic flows in order to determine the proper intersection treatment based on current and future traffic demands .
Dalton said “That’s going to be probably one of the largest road rehabilitation projects the county’s undertaking.”
“That road, we’ve had a steady increase on traffic counts. We’re anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 vehicles a day. That road is predominately, heavily used by truck traffic right from the Highway 3 to Highway 1. It’s physically used as a city bypass road.”
About 65 per cent of the project surveying and planning has been completed.
The tender will go out near the end of August and a start date in 2021.

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