New passing lanes and other improvements for Highway 881 were postponed in the provincial budget and improvements on nearby Highway 63 have been scaled back.
Thursday’s budget still contains a commitment to finish twinning Highway 63 between Edmonton and Fort McMurray by the fall of 2016, but about $228-million worth of other improvements are off the table.
“They’ve been deferred,” Parker Hogan, press secretary for Alberta Transportation, said Saturday. “We were going to do more, but we had to make some budget choices.”
That leaves Ashley Hearn concerned, but not surprised.
“I expected this,” she said. “The money’s got to come from somewhere. But seeing they’re making cuts already makes me worry this is just a beginning. That’s my biggest worry.”
However, twinning Highway 63 really is the most important part of the upgrades, said Hearn, formerly known as Ashley St. Croix, who helped organize protests a year ago asking for the road to be twinned.
The province first announced plans to twin the highway in 2006, then estimating the work would take 10 years. But progress has been slow. To date, only 52 kilometres south of Fort McMurray have been twinned and 17 kilometres to the north.
The highway has a reputation for bad accidents, recording at least 149 fatalities since 1990, most from head-on collisions.
The highway became a major issue leading up to the April 23 election. Last October, Alberta Transportation Minister Ric McIver promised to get a 240-kilometre stretch of road twinned by the fall of 2016.
At that time, Highway 63 upgrades were expected to cost $778 million. Those costs have been limited to $550 million in Thursday’s budget. Only $442 million is listed in the three-year capital plan, but the rest of the $550 million will come in the 2016-17 budget year to make the deadline, said Hogan.
Upgrades to Highway 881, which is often used as an alternate route to Fort McMurray, were expected to cost another $308 million. It’s now a two-lane paved road with some turning lanes, but was gravel 10 years ago. There is no date for the rest of the upgrades.
“Right now we’re doing what absolutely needs to be done,” said Hogan. “We recognize there’s the need. We’ve got to make that highway safe. The oilsands area is of huge economic importance.”
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