council WHOLEFor those residents asking for more spending on roads, Timmins Mayor Steve Black hears you.

As part of preliminary talks for the 2016 budget, Black put forward an idea to spend an additional $1-million on work to be done next year.

“I think we have to look at increasing our roads budget to some degree, or else the majority of our roads budget will likely be spent on the Connecting Link and the rest of the areas will continue to suffer, and we’ll probably hear feedback (from residents),” said Black.

“Our challenges in roads aren’t getting any smaller.”

In 2015, the city budgeted just over $7-million to go to road and bridge repairs.

Councillor Pat Bamford provided a different view.  Although he agrees there should be a little more funding into roads, the $1-million option didn’t sit the right way with him.

“We don’t have that kind of money,” he said, “I think we have other priorities.”

Bamford says if the city were to resurface the stretch the way they’ve been doing it this year on Algonquin, they could have the work done really fast.

“I don’t think we have to go crazy with this right now,” he added.

“Because we’ll never eradicate all the potholes in this city, never, ever ever…and we’ll always have some bad roads somewhere but we just don’t have the money.”

Bamford says money could be spent on improving quality of life in the city, with things like the proposed Aquatic Center, improving sports facilities or other popular things in the city that people would use.

The cost to fully repair the Connecting Link is said to be upwards of $70-million, and up until recently, the provincial funding to help the city was at 0%.

Last April, the province came forward with a $15-million Connecting Link fund, to be shared with 77 different municipalities, including Timmins.  Since then, many have been lobbying to have that fund increased.

Councillor Mike Doody says if done right, the word on the street is that if done properly, the Connecting Link will be good for the next 20-30 years.

He calls the state of the road “a disgrace,” and we can’t accept what is there as is.

“I would like to see what it would cost to do it over 2-3 years,” Doody says.

“Let’s borrow the money, get it done and move on and I think we’ll all be benefiting from that particular course.”

This is also the stretch that was voted the worst road in Ontario by a 2015 CAA campaign.

“When you’re looking at 50-80 million dollars on a highway that used to be 90% funded by the province, my hope is that they will still come back to the table and approach somewhere in that neighbourhood but I think we need to start preparing ourselves that it may not be the full 90%,” said Black.

“I don’t know what else to add in terms of until the study’s complete, but I don’t think it’s a poor move to start putting an extra $1-million into the roads budget, knowing there’s a 50-80 million dollar project on the horizon.”

Dubeau was the only one to oppose the motion, while Marks wasn’t present for the vote so it will go into the 2016 budget for now.