Calgary city council has agreed to divert millions in winter maintenance budget surplus from 2023 to help deal with crumbling pavement across the city.

Councillors agreed to the added recommendation of using $8.9 million from the Winter Maintenance Reserve, equivalent to the 2023 operations surplus, for street repairs through the Pavement Rehabilitation Program in 2024 – 2025.

Ward 14 Coun. Peter Demong tacked on the recommendation to the revised Winter Maintenance Policy at the Regular Meeting of Calgary city council on May 28. It’s not the first time Demong has tried to get more money directed toward raising the quality of Calgary’s 16,800 lane kilometres of roadway.

“I believe most councillors inboxes are getting fairly full with regards to concerns about the road conditions,” Demong said.

“I’m hoping that we see an awful lot less potholes, but at the same time, it’s not enough to actually do everything that we need to do. We need to start this budget taking a good hard look at what we’re putting into the roads and how we can continue to increase that funding because as we’ve heard many times before, once you allow a road to get to a certain condition, it gets even way more expensive.”

Last year at this time, Demong also wanted to tie Calgary’s pavement quality index to the annual budget adjustments. Councillors heard at Monday’s meeting that Calgary has a half-billion-dollar backlog in needed capital work on roads. Further, the amount of good or very good-rated pavement in Calgary is 38 per cent. The national average is 61 per cent.

Demong said last year he’d like to see pavement quality bumped up to at least 50 per cent.

The City of Calgary has seen a substantial increase in the number of 311 requests this year to repair potholes. Mobility director Troy McLeod said that he couldn’t say how many additional potholes would be filled with this money. Still, he called it a welcome investment as it would allow them to add more street repair crews.

“This investment will allow us to take care of immediate issues associated with street repair beyond our $6.9 million budget,” he said.

“This is almost a doubling of that service for street repairs.”

Investment needed for pavement improvement

McLeod told councillors that they have $47 million budget for annual surface overlay and street repair in the capital budget. They spend $6.9 million for general street repair and preventative maintenance, like crack sealing.

“An increase in in our annual investment, around $90 million, would be a number that we could start seeing an improvement in our Pavement Quality Index, but to keep it static around $50 million a year would keep us at our current levels,” McLeod said.

McLeod said that pavement is a $10 billion asset for the city and is growing at approximately 200 lane kilometres per year.

“If we let a facility go beyond its timeframe for surface overlay, it can be six to seven times the cost to repair that roadway,” he said.  

“So, we’re far better off doing surface overlay than we are reconstructing.  The benefit of doing some reconstruction though is we can look at the entire road section and do other add other amenities with that upgrade.”

Coun. Gian-Carlo Carra said that he’s heard extensively from his ward residents that road conditions are a problem.

“I think some money into that is appropriate and we can blame a freeze-thaw cycle but I’m sure this is also having to do with the fact that were on the low end of the road maintenance budget that we reduced for a full budgetary cycle, knowing that that would have significant wear and tear on the long-term viability of our road system,” he said.

“So, it’s a perfect storm, and I think we do need to address it.”