Work scheduled to begin this spring on $3.75M Trout Lake Road reconstruction project

A 1.6-kilometre section of Trout Lake Road — from just west of Mountainview Drive to Lees Road — will undergo months of reconstruction and rehabilitation this spring and summer.

Tuesday, North Bay City Council unanimously awarded a $3.75-million contract to Ed Seguin & Sons Trucking & Paving Ltd for the project. The Sturgeon Falls-based company scored the highest among 10 submissions in an evaluation taking into account company ability, experience, and price.

Coun. Chris Mayne, who chairs Council's infrastructure and operations committee confirms the Ontario-funded Connecting Links program will cover $3 million of the overall cost of the project that began with the rehabilitation of the section of Trout Lake Road between Giroux Street and Mountainview Drive in 2017. That work included remediation of the Trout Lake Road railway overpass and wrapped up in 2018. 

Mayne thanked the province for its contribution and advised, "We are getting excellent value for the money we are contributing as a municipality to this project."

This project includes the addition of bike lanes on either side of the 1.6-kilometre stretch of Trout Lake Road from Mountainview Drive to Lees Road, plus a sidewalk linking Mountainview and Lakeside Drive. To facilitate, sections of the roadway adjacent to the retaining wall on the escarpment side and in front of the Average Joe’s property will be completely reconstructed. 

Construction will run from May into September. The contractor will maintain at least one lane of traffic and residences and businesses in the area will have access to their properties.

"This will be one of our larger capital projects this summer. We are going to see a complete improvement of the road section," Mayne offered. "Anybody who either is a pedestrian or rides their bike in that area can appreciate that the edges of the road have deteriorated to the point where you're really travelling on gravel."

See related: Project design to bring some TLC to TLR

And: Council poised to award $3.75M contract for major Trout Lake Road reconstruction project

Ed Seguin & Sons will also pulverize the road and pave it with three new lifts of asphalt. The work will also see the replacement of the existing storm sewer system to improve drainage and a 782-metre length of "substandard guiderail" will also be replaced.

According to the associated staff report, this section of Trout Lake Road is an important link connecting North Bay's urban settlement area with its rural area and "faces significant challenges from overland flows — especially in the wintertime — when water freezes on the roadway due to insufficient drainage and grades...any detours around this portion of Trout Lake Road would require vehicles to travel more than 10 additional kilometres around."

Deputy Mayor Tanya Vrebosch agreed with the assessment, saying she had received complaints from citizens about the water pooling issue.

"I'm sure there will be a lot of people happy to see this," she adds. "We were always working on Trout Lake Road but we never made it to that section or we made small improvements."