Residents who live on the Raymo Road were happy to hear that even though the Township of Central Frontenac was unable to provide a vehicle passage over Fish Creek where two culverts collapsed two weeks ago for liability reasons, at least a walkway was going to be put in.

Kyle Labbett, public works supervisor, said at a meeting of Council last Tuesday (June 23) that, “A walkway that will be suitable for someone pushing a stroller will be put in.”

However, instead of making it easier to walk over the road, the township ended up blocking the way completely with cement forms, even putting up a berm to discourage any kind of traffic.

“This is the opposite of what they said they were going to do at the meeting,” said Steve McCullough, who lives on the Raymo Road. “They made it harder to walk over the road, not easier.”

When contacted, Kyle Labbett said that the planned walkway hit a snag when crews went to put it in late last week.

“We had planned to smooth out a path on the west side of the roadway, but when the backhoe went to do the work, a sinkhole developed between the two pipes. At that point we realized there was no safe way to put in a walkway, so we had to block off the road. Again it is a matter of liability,” he said.

With the road now fully blocked off, Labbett said the township is scrambling to put in a final fix as soon as possible.

He said that they were able to get a geo-technical study done in two days, when it usually takes up to a month, and the engineering work is proceeding. He expects to have a proposal ready for Council approval within a week or so. Mayor Frances Smith said that Council will hold a special meeting as soon as staff is ready to provide options, including costs and time lines, for the repair.

In the meantime, the only way to cross Fish Creek from Raymo Road is to go south, take Echo Lake to Oak Flats Road and come out to Road 38 at Piccadilly.

The Raymo Road culverts were inspected in 2013, as part of a bi-annual inspection of all bridges and major culverts in the township. It was determined that it had one to four years of life left in it and was slated for reconstruction in 2018.

On the day that the road caved in, trucks from Crains' Construction were carrying rocks to repair a CP rail crossing on the Raymo Road.

“Crains' is not responsible for what happened,” said Labbett. “There are no load restrictions on Central Frontenac roads.”

North Frontenac also unveils new mapping services

Kevin Farrel, the Global Informations Systems (GIS) specialist for Frontenac County, attended the annual Urban and Regional Information Systems Association-Ontario (URISA) meeting that was held in Guelph in late April.

It was fitting that he was there because the interactive mapping system that he built, Frontenacmaps.ca, led to Frontenac County winning the URISA gold award in the category of Best Public Sector GIS this year.

Since its launch Frontenacmaps has been in a continual state of improvement, with new, easy to apply layers being added over time. This past March, the launch of the mobile version of Frontenacmaps brought the service to users on the go, whether driving, hiking, or skiing in the increasingly Internet-connected county. The mapping includes aerial imagery that was generated in 2008, but by the end of this year imagery gathered in 2013 will be in place.

According to a Frontenac County press release, Frontenacmaps is well used for township and county operations.

“GIS is used every day by the county to create efficiencies for Frontenac Paramedic Services, planning, economic development and emergency management and by the townships to support the needs of planning, building, recreation and public works,” the release said.

Frontenac County Warden, Bud Clayton, said, “The county’s investment in GIS is proving valuable across our region, both for private citizens and in our township and county operations. We are proud to have one of the most sophisticated and accessible GIS systems in rural Ontario.”

In addition to the gold award for the county, North Frontenac IT technician Evan Sepa presented some of the specific applications that North Frontenac has put the base mapping to for its staff and the public, through Northfrontenac.com.

“We are very well developed in the area of online mapping and continue to grow with a number of plans to implement this effective and easy-to-use platform for distributing public information,” said Sepa.

The website includes a road works and road conditions map, a map of public facilities and resources. At the connected gis.northfrontenac.com extension to the township site a number of popular features are available, including: a cemetery viewer – where it is possible to search for cemetery plots, the deceased, and retrieve photos of headstones; an AFN Land Claim Map – which shows the areas in North Frontenac included in the Draft Algonquin Land Claim Descriptive Plan; and the Wireless Services Map – showing the towers across North Frontenac and those which provide wireless services.

North Frontenac also has a wall-sized map of the township available at the township office for $8.

A couple of years ago, the public works managers (PWM) from all four Frontenac townships came together to discuss common issues, and they found a lot to talk about. They decided that since they faced the same issues regarding road and bridge maintenance and waste management, they might be able to put out joint tenders of requests for proposals for services ranging from road line painting to engineering for their waste sites.

Neighbouring municipalities have some roads that are owned and managed by their county and some that are owned and managed by the local townships. While the Frontenac PWMs see no advantage in having more than one roads department working in the same municipality, they also know that other counties are able to apply for provincial and federal grants for their county roads, and the local townships in those counties can also apply for grants for their township-owned roads.

However, in Frontenac County, since there are no county roads, only the local townships can apply for grants, putting Frontenac at a disadvantage.

In response, the Frontenac public works managers have developed the concept of the Frontenac Corridor, made up of roads that at one time were owned and maintained by the province and were subsequently downloaded to the Frontenac townships.

They have made representations to Ontario officials and politicians, saying they are planning on treating these roads as a single system, paid for by the local townships, but managed as a single entity for the purpose of grants.

“We are hoping that the province will treat these roads as county roads, and let us apply for grants for those roads in the way a county would while still being eligible for grants for our own roads as individual townships,” said Mark Segsworth, the public works manager for South Frontenac Township. “We don't want to change anything on the ground, only to become eligible for more funding."

To that end the public works managers went as a group to Frontenac County to ask for funding for a Frontenac Corridor roads improvement plan for Road 38 in South and Central Frontenac, Road 509 in North and Central Frontenac, Road 506 in North Frontenac, Road 96 on Wolfe Island and Road 96 on Howe Island.

That study, prepared by Wills and Associates, was presented to Central and South Frontenac Council this week, and will go to Frontenac County next week.

The study does not reveal anything earth-shattering about the conditions of the roads, according to both Mike Richardson, the public works manager of Central Frontenac, and Mark Segsworth of South Frontenac.

“This is mainly about grants,” Richardson told Central Frontenac Council on Tuesday (May 13). “To a certain extent it forces us to plan together, and it might lead to joint tenders but there is no mechanism for that at this point.”

The Wills study provides a detailed breakdown of each section of road, each bridge and each culvert in the entire system, including the cost of repair or replacement, and it prioritizes all required work in the system over the long term.

Road 38, the busiest in the system, is in relatively good shape in Central Frontenac, since it was rebuilt in 2006, but in South Frontenac it has deteriorated since it was resurfaced in 1997 and needs several million dollars of work to be able to handle the amount of traffic it carries each day.

The South Frontenac Public Works Department will be proposing the second five-year road improvement plan to the new South Frontenac Council early in 2015, and Road 38 will have a prominent role in that plan, Mark Segsworth said.

While the exercise of developing what looks on paper like a county roads plan has been completed, and there is a hope that this will help secure grants in the future, there are no plans to change the way the individual township roads departments operate in Frontenac County

“I have maintained all along that the most efficient way to manage roads is as a single tier, one department working on all the roads in their jurisdiction so there is no duplication. All of the roads, culverts, bridges, etc. are well maintained by the township departments,” said Mark Segsworth.

Segsworth was more reticent however, over the idea of a single roads department operating in one united Frontenac township, which would also be a single tier system.

“That idea is best left to the politicians,” he said.